| The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of transformational leadership and transactional leadership on the cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral test scores of students in a youth traffic safety education program. Specifically, the study assessed the effect of transformational leadership training and transactional leadership training for middle school teachers on student test scores regarding three dependent (outcome) variables of interest: (1) change in traffic safety knowledge, (2) change in attitude towards traffic safety issues, and (3) change in behavior and behavioral intention regarding traffic safety issues. The assumption was made in this study that transformational leadership training would cause an increase in the three dependent variables in the study, and that these increases would be greater than any increases due to transactional leadership training.; Participants (N=361) were middle school students drawn from two public school districts in a specific region of a southeastern state. To assess differences in cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral change, a randomized block design was chosen for this study with pairs of classes defining the blocks. Pairs of similar classes were created and randomly assigned to either transformational or transactional leadership training in order to remove the teacher effect. Furthermore, these random assignments were made to cancel out the effects of a risk perception and team building training administered in the classrooms. Alpha was set at .05.; Descriptive procedures were used to analyze the demographic data for gender and grade level, as well as the numbers of students assigned to the various experimental treatments. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) along with t-tests among LSMEANS was used. Increases in cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral variables within each treatment were defined as the difference in pretest and posttest and these increases were tested and compared.; Results indicated non-significant change in the increases of cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral test scores. However, the study provided enough evidence of successful increases in the post hoc analysis to warrant further investigation of the research hypotheses in future studies. Recommendations for further research were included. |
