The Multidimensional World of the School Principal

While much research has been done on the administrative style of school principals, it has concentrated mainly on how the principal does what he does. This study investigated the content dimensions of the principal's role in response to the need for research on the impact of evolving environments on the changing role of school principals and the need for new understandings and tools to support staff development of school principals. The School Principals Task Inventory (SPTI I), an initial 52-item instrument, was prepared and submitted to graduate students in education. Based on a factor analysis of the responses, a revised instrument, SPTI II, was prepared and administered to a new sample of graduate students in education. Stability of the factors was tested by analyzing the extent that the 34 retained items on SPTI II clustered similarly to the items on SPTI I. Of 12 factors that emerged from analysis of responses to SPTI I, 7 appeared in essentially the same form among the 10 factors constituting the subscales of SPTI III, a refined 46-item subset of SPTI II. (Author/JG)