Taking Teacher Responsibility Into Account(ability): Explicating Its Multiple Components and Theoretical Status

Abstract

Accountability systems have important implications for schooling. Missing from discussions about their implementation, however, are ways they affect teacher responsibility. Responsibility has been insufficiently explicated in the education literature, including its impact on teacher motivation, emotion, and behavior. We propose that a multidimensional approach is required to capture the complexity of teacher responsibility and describe the extensive connections between teacher responsibility and existing psychological frameworks. Directions for future research and implications for teachers’ professional lives are discussed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Kara Makara, the editor, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This article was prepared while the second author was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation: DUE-0928103.

Notes

¹Strong emphasis on test-based accountability systems is likely to remain after the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2010) and through programs such as Race to the Top (U.S. Department of Education, 2009).

²Social responsibility—the tendency to adhere to social norms and to engage in prosocial behaviors (Bierhoff, 2000)—and personal responsibility are moderately correlated and share many conceptual similarities, such as self-initiative and goal commitment. According to Bierhoff et al. (2005), whereas personal responsibility is focused on individual goals and options of action, social responsibility is oriented toward others. It should be noted, however, that personal goals may derive from concern for others or that helping others is an important personal goal. Therefore, personal and social responsibility may often overlap, and it might be more appropriate to distinguish between different targets of responsibility (responsible for personal vs. other's needs and goals) rather than between different types of responsibility.

³In Guskey's (1981) Teacher Responsibility scale, teachers are asked to distribute 100 percentage points between two alternatives. A sample item is, “If a student does well in your class, would it probably be (a) because that student had the natural ability to do well, or (b) because of the encouragement you offered?” Rose and Medway's Teacher Locus of Control scale has a similar format, although the teachers are asked to choose between two alternatives and do not assign different weights. A sample item is, “When the grades of your students improve, it is more likely (a) because you found ways to motivate the students, or (b) because the students were trying harder to do well.”

⁴Sample items are “How many teachers in this school feel responsible when students in the school fail?” and “How many teachers in this school feel responsible to help each other do their best?”

⁵The instructions to these participants were “Your role is to ensure that the student learns to solve the puzzles. It is a teacher's responsibility to make sure that students perform up to standards. If, for example, your student were tested on the puzzles, he (or she) should be able to do well” (Deci et al., 1982, p. 853).

⁶ Weiner (1995) discussed the element of “should” and “ought” as a characteristic of responsibility at a later stage of his theory development, stating, “I believe that I erred in my prior conceptual analysis: Causal controllability is not to be equated with responsibility. Controllability refers to the characteristics of a cause—causes, such as the absence of effort or lack of aptitude, are or are not subject to volitional alteration. Responsibility, on the other hand, refers to a judgment made about a person—he or she ‘should’ or ‘ought to have’ done otherwise, such as trying harder, eating less, or paying more attention when driving” (p. 8).

⁷ Matteucci and Gosling (2004) found that Italian junior high school teachers accepted more responsibility for a student's low performance when they attributed this outcome to the student's low ability than to insufficient effort, but this finding was not replicated with high school teachers. The teachers’ self-ascriptions of responsibility, reported for the entire sample of junior high and high school teachers, were related to felt sympathy and to lower likelihood of failing the student (Matteucci & Gosling, 2004), but these relations were not replicated in subsequent studies with high school teachers (Matteucci, 2007; Matteucci & Gosling, 2004). Teachers’ self-ascriptions also varied as a function of culture; French high school teachers reported higher self-responsibility for student failure than Italian high school teachers (Matteucci & Gosling, 2004). Overall, the status of teachers’ self-ascriptions of responsibility is unclear.

⁸The effects of perceived organizational support were moderated by the employees’ exchange ideology, which reflects attitudes toward the appropriateness of having an exchange relationship with the organization.