Chapter IV: Employment Practices in Elementary and Secondary Schools

Abstract

DURING the period covered by this review, research on employment practices was primarily devoted to analyses or descriptions of current status. Questionnaire studies and descriptive reports of local practices dominate the literature. Relatively few reports have been concerned with evaluation of these practices or with the development of new technics.Considerable attention has been given to special statewide recruitment and training programs to meet the elementary-teacher shortage. The longrange effect of these programs on the relationships between state and local school systems and training institutions is not yet apparent altho it is evident that, for elementary teachers, local selection practices have been affected. Greater emphasis on recruitment of prospective teachers by local secondary schools is also apparent. A large portion of articles on recruitment and substitute teachers which appeared in the journals has been entirely hortatory or prescriptive in nature and has been omitted from this review.Research on the topics included in this chapter was reviewed for the period 1946-1948 by Archer (4) and Ryans (32). General summaries of research in these areas were made by Anderson (2), Archer (5), Barr (6), and Sanford and Trump (34). Domas and Tiedeman (12) prepared an annotated bibliography of major research studies in teacher competence, including indexed references to employment practices and. to specific methodologies. Teacher RecruitmentBeecher (7) studies the effectiveness of the New York State recruitment and training program for alleviating the elementary-teacher shortage. During the first three years of operation, approximately 1200 college graduates recruited for the six-week Intensive Teacher-Training Program had completed one or more summer sessions, and the potential supply of elementary teachers available from the regular four-year program was increased by 40 percent. Beecher also compared the teaching effectiveness of special trainees with regular four-year graduates. Representative samples of 100 beginning teachers were drawn from both groups. Ratings of teacher effectiveness were made by a team of experienced supervisors using two rating devices in addition to their own general appraisals. Year-end ratings indicated that the proportion of special trainees rendering average service was only slightly less than that of regularly trained teachers. However, the proportion of special trainees doing relatively superior work was only about one-third of that for teachers with four-year training. Approximately 10 186 at University of British Columbia Library on July 2, 2015 http://rer.aera.net Downloaded from