INVESTIGATION OF CANDIDATE TEACHERS' ACADEMIC PERFECTIONISM WITH COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY LEVELS ACCORDING TO VARIOUS VARIABLES

Abstract

University education necessitates students to undertake many academic responsibilities. Multiple individual factors influence the successful accomplishment of these responsibilities. Cognitive flexibility and academic perfectionism can be shown among these variables. Cognitive flexibility is closely related to responding to problems encountered in and out of the classroom and producing multiple solutions. On the other hand, academic perfectionism is the ability of individuals to fulfil their academic responsibilities in the shortest time and in the best way. In line with this information, the research aims to examine the academic perfectionism with cognitive flexibility levels of pre-service teachers in terms of different variables. The research included 276 prospective physical education teachers, 159 female and 117 male, aged between 20 and 25 (M= 22.14 ± 1.31), studying at the Faculty of Sport Sciences of two state universities. "Personal Information Form," "Academic Perfectionism Scale," and "Cognitive Flexibility Scale" were used as data collection tools. The study data were analyzed using the Pearson Correlation Test and the Independent Sample T-Test from descriptive statistics. According to the data acquired from the study, It was determined that there was a significant positive correlation between candidate teachers' age, academic perfectionism scores and their cognitive flexibility scores. It was determined that there were no significant differences between cognitive flexibility scores according to gender and academic achievement. Still, there were significant differences between cognitive flexibility scores according to age. At the same time, although there were no significant differences between the academic perfectionism scores of the participants according to their academic achievement and age, it was determined that there were significant differences between academic perfectionism scores and gender. As a result, It was determined that the candidate teachers' mean cognitive flexibility score (4.29±.502) was high, whereas the mean academic perfectionism score (2.53±.721) was close to the middle level. it was determined that candidate teachers' academic perfectionism and cognitive flexibility levels increased as their age increased, and women were found to be more academic perfectionists than men.