| The purpose of this study was to investigate the usefulness and explanatory value of practitioners' program theories in an evaluation of minority teacher recruitment programs. of particular interest were the staff theories about causal mechanisms and the intervening outcome variables that are related to Intent to Teach (INTENT), their theories about the theoretical underpinnings of the minority teacher recruitment program, how they think their theories have changed from the beginning of their involvement to the present, in what ways their theories are similar and different, and how well their program theories fit the data obtained from the program participants. The variables, in addition to the outcome variable INTENT, were Teaching Self-Efficacy (TSE), General Academic Self-Efficacy (GASE), Value of Teaching (VALUE), Interest in Teaching (INTEREST), Status of Teaching (STATUS), Financial Rewards of Teaching (FINANCE), and Self-Efficacy in Classroom Management (SECM).;Interviews were conducted to extract the six practitioners' program theories. The practitioners, overall models were very complicated, perhaps too complicated to be fit to the data, and were different from each other in significant ways even though all were involved with replicates of the "same" program. Three of six practitioners reported changing their program theories from the beginning of their involvement in designing or implementing the program to the present.;Four submodels were extracted and described: (a) the VALUE-INTEREST-INTENT relationships, (b) the INTEREST-FINANCE-INTENT relationships, (c) the STATUS-INTEREST-INTENT path, (d) the relationships among Self-Efficacy related variables (SECM, TSE, and GASE) and INTENT.;The model fit statistics for the six practitioners' overall program theories indicated that the data did not fit their models. The results of the goodness of fits for the submodels indicated that the data only fit the STATUS-INTEREST-INTENT path, the FINANCE-INTEREST-INTENT path, as well as the SECM, TSE, GASE, and INTENT relationships. The researcher further investigated the post hoc reduced model and the full model of the relationships among Self-Efficacy related variables (SECM, TSE, and GASE) and INTENT, which incorporated the measurement model into the structural models. The data fit the post hoc reduced model very well. |
