This study seeks to determine if the same five bipolar factors that appear for the ideal role concepts of public school teachers also appear for parochial school teachers. Subjects included 185 teachers from a Catholic diocese. The data were factor analyzed by means of a principal axis analysis with varimax rotation. An analysis of variance was used to compare the factor analyses. The results indicated that parochial and public school teachers have similar factor structures. When comparing factor scores of the two groups, there were significant differences on several factors, indicating that parochial school teachers adopt a more facilitating role than do public school teachers.
Previous investigation revealed that instructional role concepts of public school teachers can be described by five orthogonal factors (Bills, Note 1). The present study seeks to determine if the same five factors appear in the ideal role description of parochial school teachers, and if these factors differentiate the parochial school teachers from the public school teachers.
Earlier studies have been done at the university level (Bills, Note 2; Bills & Horton, Note 6) and for public schools at the elementary and secondary levels (Bills, Note 1). These studies determined the factors that instructors consider important in teaching, and that these factors are similar for university and public school teachers. Thus, five orthogonal factors exist in the role concepts of public school teachers and college instructors; these factors are identical for both groups.
The present study hypothesizes that the factors that appear in the role concept description of public school teachers are also present in the ideal role descriptions of parochial school teachers.
METHOD
Subjects
The participants in this study are from a Catholic diocese in a southern state. A total of 185 teachers successfully completed a Q-sort to describe their ideal teacher role concepts. Of these, 72 teach in high school and 113 teach in elementary grades.
Instrument
An 84-item Teacher Role Concept Q-Sort was the instrument used in this study (Bills, Note 1). This Q-sort was devised to measure ideal role concepts of college instructors and was later revised to measure ideal role concepts of public school teachers.
Data Collection
All teachers in 14 elementary and secondary Catholic parochial schools were asked to sort the Teacher Role Concept Q-Sort to describe the teaching roles they idealize. Respondents were requested to sort the 84 items of the Q-sort into 11 piles to form a Requests for reprints should be sent to