A Q Study of Elementary School Teachers’ Assignments of Educational Priorities and their Practice

Abstract

This study investigated the nature of elementary teachers’ priorities of behaviorally stated objectives of instruction and the practice of these priorities in the classroom. Thirty teachers, representing six school districts, were administered a 100-item structured Q-sort comprised of five theoretical categories; low cognitive, high cognitive, tool-skill, affective-personal, and affective-interactive. Statistical analyses revealed that twenty-two teachers ranked either the affective or high cognitive categories as most important. When these findings were correlated to classroom practice, no significant correlation, (r -. 150) was found between those objective teachers ranked as most important and those they practiced. The study seemed to demonstrate that although teachers did have priorities of instruction, they did not translate these priorities into their classroom practice.