A Study of the Effect of A Secondary Classroom Management Training Program on Teacher and Student Behavior

146 p.Thesis (Educat.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1981.An experimental study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of an in-service program on the management and organization of secondary classrooms. The treatment program consisted of a workshop presented at the beginning of the school year, the provision of an instructional manual which contained an analysis and synthesis of current research on teaching and learning, and a follow-up session held two weeks after the initial workshop. The sample was comprised of eighteen secondary school classrooms equally divided into treatment and control groups, and the content areas represented in the study were Mathematics and Foreign Language.Although some of the findings were mixed, the observational measures indicated that the teachers in the treatment group did implement many of the recommended managerial strategies drawn from the research base, and in addition that their students spent significantly more time engaged in appropriate learning activities, and less time off-task, or in interim activities, or waiting as compared to the control group. Moreover, a strong positive association between many of the teaching behaviors contained in the treatment program and student academic engaged time was reported.The findings indicated that for the most part the teachers in the treatment group were both willing and able to implement the managerial strategies outlined in the treatment program. In addition it was found that when these principles were utilized by the teachers it appeared that valuable benefits in terms of student learning outcomes were realized. Of equal importance, it should be noted that these results are consistent with the growing body of research on student time-on-task. Further evidence has been presented in this study that good classroom management and organization can make a difference in the learning conditions provided for students, and the findings add emphasis to the notion that this difference can be attributed to the teaching, the instructional processes that occur within the classroom, rather than any particular personal characteristic of the teacher.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD