A study of the relationships between distributed leadership, teacher academic optimism and student achievement in Taiwanese elementary schools

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between distributed leadership, teachers’ academic optimism and student achievement in learning. The study targeted public elementary schools in Taiwan and adopted stratified random sampling to investigate 1500 teachers. Teachers’ perceptions were collected by a self-report scale. In addition to using descriptive statistics and an analysis of variance to examine teachers’ perceptions, this study adopted structural equation modelling (SEM) to further analyse the relationships between distributed leadership, academic optimism and student achievement. The results showed that the model's goodness-of-fit was satisfactory. Distributed leadership not only had a positive influence on academic optimism but also indirectly affected student achievement. Furthermore, academic optimism also positively affected student achievement. In accordance with the study's results, specific suggestions are outlined to provide a reference for application in schools.

Keywords:

• academic optimism
• distributed leadership
• student achievement

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Council (NSC) of the Republic of China, Taiwan (Grant no. 98-2410-H-004-011). The author gratefully acknowledges the NSC for financial support, and the teachers, who are the most important participants in this study.