| This study's purpose was to investigate and compare the similarities, differences, in the perceptions of the media specialist's role in curriculum by principals, teachers and media specialists. Data was collected from twenty-one media specialists, twenty-two school principals, and 296 English, science and social studies teachers from the U. S. Virgin Islands public and non-public secondary schools.;Information regarding demographic data was only collected from the media specialists along with first hand information regarding their interaction with teachers on a specific subject area curriculum unit. The discrepancies found in their perceptions were as follows: (1) Media specialists indicated that they should be involved in the school curriculum performing 22 of the questionnaire tasks, but were actually involved in only five: attending faculty meetings, coordinating media resources to support instruction methods and curriculum design; developing good interpersonal relationships with teachers; assisting the faculty in media/equipment selection; and providing resource accessibility. (2) Principals and teachers indicated that media specialists should be completely involved in the curriculum and that media specialists were doing 24 of these tasks in their schools. (3) Media specialists listed their most frequent tasks as assisting teachers in searches, implementing instructional innovations, involving teachers in multimedia selection, providing multimedia materials for specific subjects, encouraging teachers to use audiovisual materials and district and school professional libraries, coordinating student assignment plans with teachers, and conducting teacher in-service training, while they sometimes, seldom or never did fifteen of the curriculum tasks listed.;This investigation's major finding was that media specialists perceived themselves as not being involved in curriculum planning while principals and teachers welcomed their involvement.;The researcher developed a five-point Likert scale in order to differentiate these perceptions and determine the extent of discrepancies between the three groups in relation to what they think media specialists should do and what media specialists actually do. A list of twenty-eight curriculum tasks was used to investigate the perceptions of the media specialist's role with two scales for each task: One termed the "posible role"--what media specialists should do; the other termed the "real role"--what they really do. |
