A study of teachers'''' concerns for curriculum change

• Main Authors: Yung Chou, 周勇
• Other Authors: Ping-huang Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2003
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/69540144594427403295

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 教育政策與領導研究所 === 91 === The purpose of this study is to understand teachers’ concerns for curriculum change. By studying all the different attributes variances, teaching variances and school character variances, the differences of teachers’ concerns for curriculum are obtained. With this result , a course policy problem is addressed and also a feasible & proper course program will be constructed. This study applies the theory from Bailey & Palsh (1992) Shotsberger & Crawford (1996) Cheung & Hattie & Ng (2001).It is an exploring analysis based on the theory of structural equation modeling (SEM), with which five stages of concern for change were developed. The samples comes from public elementary schools in Taipei City & Taipei County. The 3 target groups were those already implemented one-through-nine curriculum for one year, those who just began and those who haven’t started yet . Two teachers in a group and 6 in each school were random-sampled. It totaled 600 teachers from a 100 different schools. After one month, 78% of the questionnaires were retrieved sussessfully, which were 486 valid copies. The research tool is a re-edit scale “ Stages of Concern Questionnaire (SoCQ)“ .The alpha coefficient of internal consistency for this scale is .80. It is highly reliable. Besides, this scale applies the principal component for factor analysis. All the 3 different samples ( Taipei city , Taipei county, Taipei city & Taipei county) are cross-examined, from which extracts 5 equal factor dimensions. And each dimension contains equal behavior variables (Chart 19). The explanatatory power is 70% (Construct validity). The data in this research is dealing with quantity statistics. The quantity statistics, which included factor analysis, reliability analysis, t-test & one-way ANOVA, is adopted to cope with the data. The findings are as follows: 1.There are 5 concern stages for the elementary school teachers on the curriculum change, which accordingly are the low-concern (awareness) stage , the individual learning (informational/personal) stage, the course management (management)stage, collaboration (consequence/collaboration) stage & refocusing stage. 2.Those elementary school teachers (Taipei city & Taipei county) who are qualified by one-year teacher qualification class or by acquiring credits classes in Univ. tend to pay less attention to this course change. 3.The motivation of most elementary school teachers (Taipei city & Taipei county) to attend this study is to enrich their professional teaching skills. Besides, promotion & raise also lead to their attendance. These effects are obviously observed from those in collaboration & refocusing stages. Regarding to the requests from higher authorities, their behavior reactions are mostly negative. 4.Those who don’t have sufficient teaching resources in school pay less attention & concern to this curriculum change. 5.Those who often implemented the new teaching methods are better co-workrs with other teachers. They are more willing to find out the alternatives within the current change. 6.Those teachers who have implemented the curriculum change for one year, pay more attention in the collaboration stage than those who just began . It means they are better on coordinated-teaching with other teachers. Besides, those who have carried out one year’s implementation possess higher concern & flexibility for the curriculum change than those who hasn’t implemented it. 7.Differences on the stage of the course change concern can be observed for teachers in different locations. According to the data we obtained in the research, those in Taipei County excelled those in Taipei city in the following stages, as of low-concern, individual learning, collaboration & re-concern. 8. Teachers who don’t have parents’ support are concerned with difficulty of the curriculum change implementation. Those who experienced the supports from the students’ parents are more focused on the processes and targets of the curriculum change implementation. They also make use of the web & teaching resources well. They coordinate and collaborate better with colleagues. They are more willing to explore effective methods to improve or replace their current teaching methods. 9.Those who have supports from textbook suppliers collaborate better with co-workers for the curriculum change. 10.Those teachers in big-size school can complete curriculum change efficiently and tend to adjust it well; the small-size ones pay less attention to the curriculum change. This study will discuss the above findings. A couple of courses and concrete courses implementation program with regard to concern levels to reform phases will be addressed for reference.