Date of Award

8-1-1968

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (Ded)

Department

Educational Leadership

Abstract

Problem . The purpose of this study was to determine whether the use of teacher aides would show any change in teachers' patterns of communication.

Procedure Teachers of three schools, paired with three other schools by factors such as plant facilities, student enrollment and student/ teacher ratio, served as the control group. The teachers of the three other schools served as the experimental group with teacher aides employed as the criterion measure. Ten trained observers in interaction analysis recorded the verbal classroom behavior of these teachers in the fall and again in the spring of the school term to indicate whether a change in verbal behavior was found as a result of utilizing teacher aides. The data-was studied by recording the observations in ten-column by ten-row matrices. The statistical techniques employed in the analysis of the data were t tests for comparing mean changes between the fall and spring observations and analysis of covariance for differences between the control and experimental teachers.

Results and Conclusions The findings of this study support the following general conclusions: 1. The employment of teacher aides causes little change in teachers' classroom behavior in areas such as asking questions, lecturing, accepting feelings of students,' praising or encouraging students, giving directions, allowing self-initiated student talk or in the amount of silence or confusion when tested as individual units. 2. Teachers using teacher aides allowed student talk in response to questions more than those teachers not using teacher aides. 3. An increase of indirect teacher response following student talk was found in those schools using teacher aides. 4. The amount of silence or confusion in the classroom following student or teacher talk showed no change when teacher aides were utilized. 5. No difference was found in the use of extended indirect or extended direct influence by teachers using teacher aides. 6. Direct teacher response following student talk did not change with the addition of teacher aides. 7. Differences were not found in teachers indirect/direct ratio nor in their revised indirect/direct ratio of communication when teacher aides were utilized. 8. In general, teacher aides have very little effect on changes in verbal behavior of classroom teachers. Teachers must have the desire for change and be willing to accept professional guidance in bringinging about changes in their classroom verbal behavior.

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