A study of teacher misassignment among secondary school teachers in Newfoundland and Labrador

Badcock, Leonard Clyde (1972) A study of teacher misassignment among secondary school teachers in Newfoundland and Labrador. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence of teacher misassignment among secondary school teachers in Newfoundland, and to identify relationships existing between misassignment and a number of selected personal, professional, and situational characteristics. In particular, three aspects of misassignment were examined: misassignment in terms of teachers' subject fields of specialization, their teaching preferences, and the school organizational division orientations of their training programmes. -- A questionnaire prepared by the researcher was utilized to solicit data from the sample. Approximately seventy per cent of the questionnaires forwarded to the subjects were returned fully completed and entirely usable for analysis. The data treatment entailed the assignment of misassignment scores to individual teachers reporting indicating their declared degrees of subject-field and teacher-preference misassignment. School division misassignment was determined by a tabulation of teachers who had not studied high school methods in their teacher training programmes. -- The data analysis revealed that the three aspects of teacher misassignment examined were prevalent in varying degrees. In terms of the assignment descriptions employed in the various misassignment scales, the findings indicated that of the teachers reporting, over half were assigned to residual subject areas of specialization either entirely or in addition to the areas of their majors or minors, approximately twenty-five per cent had not prepared professionally to teach secondary students, and over ten per cent were assigned entirely incongruently with any subject field of preference. -- The findings further revealed that although teacher-preference misassignment was not significantly related to any of the variables considered, both subject-field and school-division misassignment were significantly related to these variables in the majority of cases. Subject- field misassignment, in particular, was found to be greater for teachers with lower rather than higher teaching grades; for teachers without high school methods than for those with high school methods; for teachers with few rather than many courses in their majors; for teachers who spent small rather than large proportions of their teaching time in their major assignments; and for teachers who taught more than two different courses in the school programme. Subject-field misassignment was also greater in the smallest towns, in central high schools compared to senior high schools, and in schools employing fewer than sixteen teachers. -- The incidence of school-division misassignment was found to be greater for female teachers than for male teachers, for teachers with low rather than high teaching grades, for teachers with few rather than many courses in their major fields of specialization, and in both the central and the junior high schools than in the senior high schools. -- An informal comparison of the degrees of misassignment found suggested that subject-field misassignment was prevalent to the greatest extent, school-division misassignment, though also extensive, was somewhat less acute, and teacher-preference misassignment was the least prevalent of the throe aspects examined.

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