Assessment of Communication Skills of Physical Education and Sport Students in Turkish Universities

This study assessed the communication skills of the students studying in physical education and sports schools in various universities in Turkey. A total of 1,854 Physical Education and Sports students in five Turkish universities participated in the study. The instrument used to gather information for this study comprised the demographic information of participants and Communication Skills Assessment Scale (CSAS) composed of 25 items. The 5 point Likert-type scale was developed by Korkut in 1996 and did not include reverse expressive items, and its assessment was carried out by the sum of scores on all items. Görmüs et al. in 2003 determined the CSAS Cronbach's alpha value as 0.841 in their study they carried out with the participation of 187 participants. After being transferred to the computer environment, the obtained data were subjected to various statistical processes. Accordingly, distribution analysis of the data was carried out at first and in accordance with the result obtained, parametric statistical applications were initiated. Frequency analysis was used in the assessment of participants' demographic data, t-test was used for the determination of the relationship between gender and variables, one-way analysis of variance was used for the determination of relationship between school, department, grade and age groups with variables, and Tukey's test was used for the determination of the fact that from which group was the possible relationship resulted. According to the results, communication skills of the participants were at high level. According to the results obtained in the study, it was observed that, among the participants, 18 Mart University students (X = 75,262 ± 10,173) had lower averages on the basis of communication skills compared to the students of Firat University (X = 77,532 ± 10,670), Inönü (X = 80,946 ± 9,003) and Kafkas University (X = 77,501 ± 17,877). On the other hand, it was seen that Anadolu University students (X = 75,181 ± 10,321) had lower average of communication skills compared to the students of Firat, Inönü and Kafkas Universities, and Firat University students had lower averages compared to Inönü University students.