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

• Main Author: Badcock, Leonard Clyde
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Memorial University of Newfoundland 1972
• Subjects: Newfoundland
• Online Access: https://research.library.mun.ca/7200/; https://research.library.mun.ca/7200/1/Badcock_LeonardClyde.pdf; https://research.library.mun.ca/7200/3/Badcock_LeonardClyde.pdf

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 ...