Even a casual review of the literature of the past few years will indicate a proiiounced increase in interest in the application of behavior modification techniques in a great variety of settings and situations. One of the major areas of behavior modification is in the educational program. The efficacy of the technique has been espoused by many of those in teacher-training programs, and the study of behavior modification is standard fare in both undergraduate and graduate course work. It is not difficult to find in the professional literature examples of behavior modification as applied to typical educational problems, but a question exists whether the regular classroom teacher accepts the principles and concepts of behavior modification. A review of the literature for the past 5 years has not disclosed any information pertinent to the feelings of teachers toward behavior modification. There were also no indications of the availability of an instrument to evaluate these feelings. This article describes the development of a scale designed to measure the attitudes of teachers toward behavior modification. METHOD ProcedureIt was decided to use a 20-item Likert technique with a 5-point scale of strongly agree, agree, neutral or undecided, disagree, strongly disagree. Each alternative was numerically equated from 5 to 1 and scored as the sum of the numerical equivalents weighted so that the higher scores indicated the more favorable (positive) attitude.The first step in the development of the scale was to obtain a pool of statements on behavior modification that met the informal criteria for attitude statements as described by Edwards (1957, pp. 13-14). Most of these statements were written by the author, but statements also were solicited from his peers and from students. Statements that did not meet the criteria either were rewritten or discarded, and those 31 statements that survived the criteria screening were submitted to upperlevel students in a preservice education program as a preliminary administration.The results of the preliminary administration were tabulated into a matrix of subject and score for each item. A Pearson correlation coefficient was calculated between the item score and the total score on the scale minus the item score to avoid the interaction of that item's score. To maximize the internal consistency of the scale, the 20 items that showed the highest adjusted item total correlation were incorporated into the final version of the scale. All of the items selected for the final revision yielded a correlation of .47 or higher. The final version consisted of 20 statements with 13 positive and 7 negative wordings, the order of which was determined randomly. Attitude Scale below:The statements and instructions that constitute the completed scale are listed
Within the educational community there has been a growing concern with the evaluation of various programs that previously had been accepted as beneficial with no or only cursory examination. The new thrust is referred to as "accountability" and is permeating all levels of educational thinking, operations, and planning. It is not a novel idea inasmuch as most teachers and administrators have long struggled to determine the efficacy of their courses or programs and have attempted many different techniques.In the evaluation of nonacademic areas, considerably greater difficulty seems to have arisen in arriving at a suitable methodology. such a nonacademic area which, according to the philosophy of the program, is a service available to all students. By implication, then, individual students have an option whether to avail themselves of or reject the services of the guidance office. Thus, if the guidance office projects a favorable image and if the students possess a positive attitude toward the guidance office, its services would be used more than if the image and attitudes were negative. were serving the entire school population effectively, there would be an increasingly favorable attitude shown toward the guidance office and its services as the students progress toward graduation.The secondary guidance program is an example of It also seems likely that if the guidance servicesThe use of a survey or questionnaire to determine attitudes toward various facets and €unctions of the schools is an accepted evaluative and research technique. reports based upon attitude surveys, and many of these are focused on guidance departments. Most of the latter, however, were designed to investigate specific activities of the counseling service or to examine the attitudes of a specific population. Very few studies have attempted to sample the total population of The literature is replete with SEPTEMBER 1973 25
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