Teacher Responsibility: Its Meaning, Measure, and Educational Implications.

Abstract

Teachers’ personal sense of responsibility potentially influences their instructional practices, psychological well-being, and ultimately their students’ learning and performance. Furthermore, the assumption that teachers are personally responsible, or that they should assume personal responsibility for their students’ educational outcomes—primarily test performance—is at the core of high-impact educational policies such as the implementation of accountability systems in American schools. Yet, the extant literature on teacher responsibility is plagued by conceptual and operational ambiguity: the term responsibility has been used interchangeably with related constructs such as internal locus of control, measurement instruments have incorporated items originally designed to assess other constructs such as efficacy, and have generally failed to acknowledge the multidimensional nature of teacher responsibility, and the literature lacks a comprehensive and consistent definition of the term. Accordingly, this multiple manuscript dissertation begins with a review of the theoretical status of teacher responsibility in the context of current education policy and a comprehensive definition of the term. The second manuscript is an empirical study focusing on the measurement of teacher responsibility that (a) reviews existing measures of teacher responsibility, (b) introduces a multidimensional assessment of teacher responsibility for critical educational outcomes such as student motivation, student achievement, for having positive relationships with students, and for providing high quality instruction (the Teacher Responsibility Scale), and (c) demonstrates that teacher responsibility and teacher efficacy are conceptually and empirically distinct. The third manuscript examines how teachers conceptualize their professional responsibility and how they perceive its antecedents and consequences. The concluding chapter discusses the current status of teacher responsibility research, and outlines directions for future research.PHDEducation & PsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99839/1/fanim_1.pd