Publication: Principals' pupil control ideology and school discipline effectiveness
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Date
1989
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This study examined the relationship between the principal's pupil control ideology and the school's discipline effectiveness as perceived by its teachers. In the process of examining this relationship the significance of the participant's age, sex and length of service to the school was examined for both variables.<br><br>Principals and teachers from 25 secondary schools participated in the study. The schools were randomly selected from all secondary schools located in or near public housing estates. All the schools prepare students for examination in Singapore-Cambridge GCE 'O' and 'N' levels. Of the participating principals 10 were male and 15 female. Of the participating teachers 123 were male and 117 female.<br><br>Two instruments were developed to measure the variables. The PCIQ was developed as a 13-item questionnaire to measure the principal's pupil control ideology along a humanistic-custodial continuum. It uses a 5-point Likert-type scale. The DOEQ was developed as a 13-item questionnaire to measure simultaneously the teachers' "perceptions" and "expectations" of the schools' discipline processes. The DOEQ was distributed to specified types of teacher in each of the 25 schools. The absolute difference in the "perceptions" score and the "expectations" score was then used as a measure of the teachers' perceptions of the effectiveness of the schools' discipline processes.<br><br>The principals' pupil control ideology and schools' discipline effectiveness was found to have a very low product-moment correlation coefficient of 0.05 when male and female principals were taken together. When male and female principals were considered separately it was found that although correlation coefficients were still low, 0.31 for male principals and -0.29 for female principals, the correlation was clearly in different directions for male and female principals. The more humanistic male principal achieved greater school discipline effectiveness than his more custodial male counterpart, whereas, the more custodial female principal achieved greater school discipline effectiveness than her more humanistic female counterpart.<br><br>The difference in the mean scores on the PCIQ for male and female principals was found to be significant at the 1% level. Female principals were the more humanistic on average. Longer-serving principals were found to be significantly (5% level) more custodial in their PCIQ scores than shorter serving-principals.<br><br>Younger teachers were found to be more critical of their school's discipline processes (1% level) than older teachers, but there was no significant difference in the male and female teachers' opinions of these processes.<br><br>Teachers' "expectation" scores in the DOEQ were found to be not significantly different for younger and older groups, male and female groups, and longer-serving and shorter-serving groups.<br><br>Teachers' "perception" scores in the DOEQ were found to be significantly different for younger and older groups (0.1% level) of teachers and for shorter-serving groups (1% level) of teachers. Younger and shorter-serving teachers were the more critical. No significant difference was observed in "perception" scores of the male and female group of teachers.