Comparison of Education Students, Successful Science Teachers and Educational Administrators on the Edwards PPS

THE PURPOSE of the r e s e a r ch to be reported I here is to compare several teacher groups on a per sonality test standardized onacollege population and designed to measure the relative strength of 15 personality needs or dimensions. There are sever al reasons for exploring the need structure of occu pational groups such as teachers: 1) Teachers are in a position to serve as models for individuals whose preferences are uncertain. With the excep tion of parents, teachers comprise the group of adults with whom the child has most f r e q u e nt and intimate contact. 2) Teachers are relatively free to reward or punish, implicitly or explicitly, those preferences which children do exhibit. It is of con cern to ask what sorts of preferences are likely to be approved or disapproved by persons exhibiting such a need structure. 3) Such data can at least be suggestive in the areas of teacher selection and training. This report is directed to the problem of describing and discussing the need structure of pub lic school teachers as measured by the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule (PPS). The PPS consists of 210 forced-choice items. Each pair of items is matched approximately for mean social desirability value, as previously judg ed by college students, to minimize the effect of so cial desirability on item choice. Items measuring one need are paired twice with each of the remain ing 14 needs; thus the total raw score on the test will be the same for all persons. The needs mea sured by the PPS are those indicated in the manual (2) and follow Murray's (6) definitions and nomen clature. The cases were grouped as follows: 1) 781 male students in the College of Education, University of Utah, who enrolled in an orientation course during 1955-56. This course is required of entering edu cation students and most of the students were Freshmen or Sophomores. The average age was 20. 4 years. In the report, this group is known as the "Education Student" group. 2) 53 Male teachers who were enrolled in an Academic-Year Institute in the science-teaching field supported by the National Science Foundation, 1957-58. This group has an | average teaching experience of seven years and were judged to be successful by their supervisors. The average age was 34 years. This group is known as the "Successful Teacher" group. 3) 3 2 School administrators who were involved in an in service training program. This group had an aver age of ten years experience in the schools and were presently employed as administrators. The aver age age was 38. 4 years. This group is designated "Administrators. " Table I presents the c o m p a r ison of the groups with the norm group of college males on the PPS. As can be seen in this table, if these groups are looked upon as randomly selected groups , which strictly speaking they are not, there are a number of statistically significant differences. The educa tion student group is more deferring, orderly, af filiative, intraceptive, abasing, nur tur ant, endur ing, and less autonomous, succorant, change-or iented, heterosexual and aggressive than the norm group in need structure as measured by the PPS. The successful teacher group is more deferring, orderly, abasing, enduring and less exhibitionistic and heterosexual than the norm group. The admin istrator group is more deferring, orderly, endur ing and less exhibitionistic, autonomous, and het erosexual than the norm group. Since one-half of the education student group do not stay in teaching, perhaps the differences obtain ed with this group relate to needs that tend to take education students away from teaching, e.g., the student group is significantly more exhibitionistic than mature teachers or administrators. Often teaching is couched in terms of aiding and assisting others, interaction in many groups, and analyzing the behavior of others. If this is so, one would ex pect high nurturance, affiliation and intra c e p t i o n scores. Such is not the case. The present findings are consistent with previous work by Barr (1), Jackson and Guba (5) and Fulkerson (4). The evidence seems to indicate that teachers are not highly motivated by a strong interest in social service, by powerful nur tur ant needs, or even by a deep interest in children. Descriptively, the sue