A survey of research tasks required by public school administrators and secondary and elementary teachers in Oregon

Graduation date: 1984The purposes of this study were to determine which research tasks\ud were necessary to the job descriptions of public school\ud administrators, secondary and elementary teachers; what task clusters\ud could be identified for college and university curriculums; what\ud differences existed between sample groups.\ud The instrument was validated through the Delphi technique. The\ud computed reliability coefficient was found to be +.974. The\ud questionnaire contained 35 task statements, with a six-point scale\ud being utilized to evaluate task importance with regard to job\ud positions. The random sample consisted of 383 school administrators,\ud elementary and secondary teachers. Tests of significance were\ud conducted using a one-way analysis of variance, followed by Tukey's\ud w test for rejected hypotheses. R-mode factor analysis was used to\ud cluster tasks.\ud Twenty-five of the thirty-five hypotheses were rejected. The\ud total group identified 28 tasks as being somewhat important to very\ud important, while seven were rated as having little importance to the\ud job positions. Administrators scored the tasks consistently higher\ud than did the teacher groups. A five-factor solution extracted 31\ud tasks with factor loadings of +.48 or higher, with two overlaps. Four\ud spurious tasks were identified in the clustering phase of the\ud analysis. The five factors which were generated for this study\ud included:\ud Factor I - General Research Knowledge\ud Factor II - Tests and Instruments\ud Factor III - Use of Computers\ud Factor IV - Measures of Dispersion\ud Factor V - Data Collection and Reporting\ud Based on the findings of the study, curriculums should be\ud developed around the five factors, giving proper attention to the\ud differences noted between the three groups and to the magnitude of\ud resulting task mean scores