Selected administrative internship practices as perceived by former interns, educational administration professors, and host administrators

The problems this study examined were the perceptions of former interns who did and did not become administrators, their university supervisors, and host administrators about the value of selected administrative internship practices in four critical internship areas: (a) the goals, (b) the structural aspects, (c) the procedural aspects, and (d) the experience areas of the program. Additionally, the study explored relationships among perceptions of internship goals, selected structural aspects of the internship, the procedures of the internship, and the importance of selected experience areas of the internship. The sample included 1100 respondents: 262 interns who were administrators at the time of the assessment, 288 interns who had not received an administrative appointment, 425 cooperating administrators, and 125 university supervisors. The major findings of the study were: There was general agreement that internships provided interns with the skills necessary to become competent administrators, although in several cases, interns seemed to indicate less agreement than cooperating administrators or university supervisors; there was general agreement that the internship should have an explicit structure, that it should be mandatory, and that there should be a clear articulation of relationships and cooperation between the host school and the university; there was agreement that the internship should be held at the end of the educational sequence, that the three participants should be involved in planning and evaluation, that the intern should be given significant responsibility on the job, and that adequate oversight should be maintained; there was agreement that virtually all experiences the internship offered were very important; agreement among the goals was moderately correlated and weakly related to procedures, structure, and experiences; correlations among the structural variables covered a wide range, but in general were moderately relat ed, and weakly related to procedures and experience areas; structural variables tended to have significant relationships with who should place the intern in the school, what should be included in the opportunities to learn, and the length of the internship; and relationships among the experience areas were generally moderate to strong. It was concluded that internship programs provide valuable experiences for interns; however, internship programs have neglected issues of innovation and the administrator as a change agent