Importance of instructional skills to elementary school teachers as a function of origin of knowledge and instructional conditions. (Volumes I and II)

The present study investigated teachers' perceptions of a variety of recommended skills. The writer developed a mail survey of teacher perceptions of the importance of selected skills for various contextual conditions--source of origin of recommended skill (classroom/training), student achievement level (high/low), grade (2nd/5th), content (reading/math) and feasibility (real/ideal).;Two parallel questionnaire forms were administered to teachers, one half of each claiming its basis in classroom and training literature. The questionnaire was mailed to 198 randomly selected school principals who were asked to distribute it to a total of 384 teachers for completion. The teachers were randomly assigned to one of 16 experimental conditions based on the above-noted factors. Three hundred forty-one teachers (89%) responded to the survey.;Data were analyzed using several different statistics. A 3 x 2 ANOVA with repeated measures on both factors and descriptive statistics provided data on the general importance of different types of skills. Specific contextual emphases were analyzed through five-way ANOVAs with repeated measure on the last factor. These were performed on the survey subsection scores and the 32 individual item scores. Significant results yielded the following: (1) Overall, teachers considered these skills to be quite important for instruction. Application of Evaluation skills is perceived to be less challenging, particularly compared to Planning tasks. (2) The influence of origin varied, depending on the type of skill and instructional conditions. (3) Occasionally, teachers found difficulty applying skills with the lower-achieving students. (4) Teachers indicated a greater rate of application of skills with 5th than 2nd grade children, particularly for "evaluation" items. (5) Teachers indicated more planning for reading than math, and several individual content interactions were found. (6) Real/ideal differences were found for every item pair in the survey.;Several recommendations for future investigation and teacher education were made, based on these results.