Teachers' perceptions of why the primary and elementary students in their small rural schools consistently score at or above the provincial average on the CTBS

Howard, Jeffrey J. (1996) Teachers' perceptions of why the primary and elementary students in their small rural schools consistently score at or above the provincial average on the CTBS. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

The general perception in society seems to be bigger is better. A review of CTBS scores, however, revealed that many small rural schools in Newfoundland and Labrador scored at or above the provincial average on the Canadian Tests of Basic Skills. In fact, thirteen small rural schools consistently scored at or above the provincial CTBS average. This thesis is a qualitative study investigating why ten of these small rural schools in Newfoundland and Labrador consistently scored at or above the provincial mean for Canadian Tests of Basic Skills' scores from 1988 to 1993. -- The teachers and administrators of these ten small rural schools were asked to give their perceptions of what factors they felt contributed to the students’ success on the CTBS. The teachers and administrators completed an open-ended response statement. This open-ended approach was used to give the respondents an unstructured, unguided format to express their views. -- School and community profiles were compiled from the respondents' perceptions, as well as, from Statistics Canada data and from data retrieved from the Department of Education's databanks. This information was combined in an attempt to find factors common among all the schools in the study. -- This study provided some insight into some of the possible reasons why these small rural schools consistently scored well on the CTBS. Although some of these small rural schools shared some common characteristics, the prevailing theme was that each school has a pool of characteristics exclusive to that school. It is this pool of characteristics which makes each school successful.

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