Attitudes of teachers in middle schools toward staff development
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to determine what progress a Middle Tennessee School System has made in staff development according to the national standards. This study examined current trends in educational reform and the type of training that has been involved. Teachers' attitudes with more than ten years of experience were compared to teachers with less than ten years of experience to determine if there was a significant difference in feelings about staff development. The self-assessment furnished by the National Staff Development Council was used to determine teacher attitudes. The assessment was administered to one-half or five of the nine middle schools in the system. There were 190 teachers in the schools that were drawn from a box to complete the assessment, and 175 were returned. The first hypotheses was analyzed using a t-test looking at the different experience levels of teachers. This test found that there was no difference in attitudes between teachers with more than ten years' experience compared to those with less than ten years of experience. The sample's performance to the national standard was analyzed using a chi-square test, which did not find this difference to be a statistically significantly different. An Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) test was run to obtain a f-statistic to determine if there were significant differences between the schools on each item on the assessment. The f-statistic was statistically significant on Context 3, Context 4, Process 2, Process 9, Content 3, Content 5, Content 9, and Content 10. These standards are given in Appendix B of this paper. Recommendations were made to use more models of staff development such as coaching, action research and study groups. Another was an ongoing study similar to this one should be used to continuously evaluate the progress of staff development. It was also recommended that the weak areas of the assessment be studied. Two of the most important recommendations were that time for training and money should be put in the school budget. The researcher recommended that staff development is the beginning of change and research in this area should continue.
Subject Area
School administration|Teacher education
Recommended Citation
Lillian Lovett Ward,
"Attitudes of teachers in middle schools toward staff development"
(1998).
ETD Collection for Tennessee State University.
Paper AAI9907864.
https://digitalscholarship.tnstate.edu/dissertations/AAI9907864