Evaluating a teacher internship programme
Date
1980
Authors
Mitchell, Bruce O.
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Abstract
Concerned with the growing trend to increased field experiences for students in pre-service education programmes, and with the limited number of studies of the effectiveness of this practice, this study attempted: (1) to apply the concepts of organizational effectiveness to the design of an evaluation model, (2) to conduct an evaluation of a teacher internship programme using the proposed model.
The University of Victoria's Secondary Internship Programme, the Programme evaluated, is a 12-month secondary teacher education programme. The background, context, and description of the critical features are provided for this programme which operates in concert with four north and mid-Vancouver Island school districts.
A review of the theory of organizational effectiveness revealed the construct to be both complex and elusive. However, recognizing its potential usefulness for an evaluation, a two-dimensional model was adopted where an evaluation of the Programme's effectiveness considered two related concepts: (a) the notion of goals, and (b) the system's perspective. The model incorporated both short-term and long-term programme affects and five system resource requirements: roles, constituent satisfaction, rational co-ordination, adaptability-flexibility, and cost benefit.
The purpose of the evaluation was to conduct a third party summative evaluation of the Secondary Internship Programme with the view to contributing information useful for making decisions regarding its continuation, modification, expansion or contraction. As the study was planned to satisfy the needs of the various audiences of the evaluation a major focus of the study was on the verification or preference ordering of the organization's operative goals and system resources by these audiences. By having the audiences Q-sort 43 possible evaluation questions the more important evaluation questions for these audiences were determined.
The primary instruments used to investigate the evaluation questions consisted of questionnaires, follow-up surveys, Faculty and School Associate profiles, semi-structured interviews, scenarios, and telephone interviews. Over 300 individuals participated in this study including present constituent groups such as Interns, School Associates and district personnel; graduates of the Programme; and principals of schools in which graduates were teaching.
It was concluded that a conceptual framework drawn from the literature of organizational effectiveness, when supplemented by a full description of the programme to be evaluated and a report on the implementation of critical programme features, has several advantages for the evaluation of teacher education programmes. It was emphasized that the model's usefulness was contingent upon audience verification of the organization's goals and system resource requirements.
In general, the Secondary Internship Programme was found to be successful in meeting its goal and system resource requirements. However, the study raises a number of critical issues, especially regarding s y stem resource requirements for future development, and for the survival of the programme evaluated.