Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ash, Patricia Marie

Titel

Organizational health and teacher stages of concern about an innovation

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

1992

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• An integral part of educational administration's canon has been the belief that teacher performance depends not only on individual needs but also on the formal and informal characteristics of a school organization. Accordingly, this research project was initiated to explore the proposition that teachers' concerns regarding an innovation are not solely universal, but may depend for the intensity on certain environmental forces. This study examined the relationship between school health and teacher stages of concern with regard to the innovation, Instructional Theory into Practice (ITIP). The sample consisted of 31 elementary and middle schools from 25 school districts across 10 counties in New Jersey. These schools were drawn from throughout the socioeconomic spectrum. Teams from each school completed the Stages of Concern Questionnaire before and after ITIP training. A Single-item statement was given to teachers 10 weeks after training which estimated teachers' perceived use of ITIP skills. The Organizational Health Inventory was administered to randomly selected teachers in each school. All survey items were aggregated to the school and merged. Construct validity and reliability of the data were checked, and un-interpretable scales were dropped from the analysis. Five hypotheses were tested: (H1) pre-training stages of concern and school health, (H2) post-training stages of concern and school health, (H3) pre-training stages of concern, school health, and extent of ITIP implementation, (H4) post-training stages of concern, school health, and extent of ITIP implementation, and (H5) teachers' concerns develop in stages predicted by the theory. The evidence on whether teacher stages of concern regarding an innovation are universal or contextually driven was inconclusive. The empirical work permitted few definitive claims on the etiology of teachers' concerns, largely because the Stages of Concern Questionnaire (SoCQ) performed poorly. The main difficulty was that SoCQ scales were incomparably reliable between successive administrations. Pre-test data were reliable, but post-test data were unreliable, or vice-versa. The data allowed an estimation of relationships between school health measures and teacher stages of concern in general. For example, measures of school health were unrelated to measures of teacher stages of concern. However, a school's task orientation, expressed in both principal's behavior (initiating structure) and teacher's academic emphasis (technical health), was related to the emergence of teachers' concerns regarding the ITIP innovation. As academic emphasis increased, teachers' pre-personal concerns decreased; as initiating structure increased, teachers' post-consequence concerns increased.