International Conference of Social Science, Literature, Business and Education, Los Angeles, United States Of America, 01 February 2018, pp.4
Society has a responsibility to guide, shape, and influence the next generation of leaders, discovering and releasing their untapped potential. The path to becoming an effective leader can be long and arduous; however, the first step is engaging in a leadership development program. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of a student leadership program based on “the five practices of exemplary leadership mode”. The research is conducted by using experimental method from quantitative research types. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of “the student leadership program”, a pre-test and post-test control group is used. The study group consisting of 44 students studying at Yildiz Technical University in the 2016-2017 academic year is established to carry out the experiment. The experimental group consists of 22 students from the Department of Turkish Language Teaching, and the control group consists of 22 students from the Department of Primary Education. The self-version of the “student leadership practices inventory” (S-LPI) was double-blind translated from English into Turkish and applied as a pre-test and post-test in order to measure the effectiveness of the program, which consisted of one weekly one-hour session held over seven weeks. In order to analyze the data, descriptive statistics and a two-way ANOVA for complex measurements were employed. The results showed a statistically significant change for three leadership practices: Inspire, Challenge, and Encourage. The remaining two leadership practices (model and enable) were in the predicted direction but did not reach statistically significant levels. Based on the findings, it is recommended that student leadership programs should be applied in a widespread manner to improve students’ leadership behaviors. Key words: Leadership, exemplary leadership model, college students’ leadership development, experimental method.