Teacher attitudes toward use and teaching of consumer credit and relationships to consumer credit content of secondary school home economic classes

The purpose of this study was to (1) compare the consumer credit content of North Carolina secondary school home economics classes with the content recommended by the North Carolina State Department of Public Instruction, (2) identify teacher attitudes toward the use of and toward the teaching of consumer credit, (3) determine any existing relationships between teacher attitudes and the consumer credit content of classes taught by them, and (4) determine any significant relationships between teacher attitudes and selected personal characteristics such as age, teaching experience, and time lapse since last formal study of consumer credit. Data were secured by a pretested questionnaire constructed by the investigator. Questionnaires were mailed to a sample of 160 teachers randomly drawn from a list of all vocational home economics teachers employed in North Carolina during the 1971-1972 school year. Results revealed that a majority of the respondents were including more than one-half of the recommended consumer credit topics for their home economics classes. Teachers tended to include the rather general recommended credit topics and to omit the more specific ones. In general, teachers included many more topics in their study of credit than were recommended for a particular class