Research On Incentives For Concurrent Science Teachers In Primary Schools

Under the social background nowadays,the government and the public have realized the important role of science and technology in social development,and the significance of science courses in primary school is gradually increasing.However,due to the constraints of social and economic conditions and other factors,many primary schools cannot be allocated with enough professional science teachers,so teachers of other disciplines need to take science classes concurrently.This paper conducts a research based on Expectancy Theory to study whether the strength of incentives that teachers(who work in public primary schools in N District,F City,Guangdong Province)get will convert their willingness to teach science courses concurrently.Questionnaire survey and interview are utilized in this research.Incentives are separated into six dimensions named professional achievements,interpersonal communications,position promotions,social respects,democratic decision-making,and bonuses.The regression analysis model used in this paper is the Binomial Logit Model.Four theoretical models have been built to carry out statistical analyses.The research results reveal that:on the whole,the willingness of teachers to teach science courses concurrently is positively correlated to the incentive they receive from their jobs.Concretely subdivided into six different dimensions of motivation,five of them can have a positive effect on the teachers’ willingness to continue teaching science courses,except bonuses.Hosmer-Lemeshow Tests are performed to tell which model have the best goodness of fit.The results show that among the four theoretical models,using one single dimension named professional achievement alone can predict teachers’ willingness to teach science courses most accurately.At the same time,it is verified that duration of teaching science lessons will cause various levels of moderating effect between five dimensions of incentives and teachers’ willingness to keep taking concurrent science lessons and between the overall incentive and teachers’ willingness to keep taking concurrent science lessons.In overall,with the growth of the number of years of teaching science courses,it first exhibits a positive adjustment(the positive impact of incentive intensity on willingness to teach science courses becomes more significant),and then changes to a negative adjustment(the positive impact of incentive intensity on willingness to teach science courses becomes less significant),showing an inverted U-shaped curve.But the moderating effect may vary from aspect to aspect.From the standpoint of management,this paper combines the theories of management and pedagogy to analyze the incentive problem of teachers,and builds a theoretical model to predict whether teachers are willing to teach science courses concurrently.Meanwhile,it is found that bonuses cannot motivate teachers’ willingness to teach science courses concurrently,which can be justified by the high threshold and low marginal utility.This finding has widened the research boundary of incentive theory to some extent.