Teacher Competencies--Now and Then. What is the Relationship?

The purpose of this study was to explore relationships existing between present-day teacher competencies and those resulting from a study conducted in the 1920's called the Commonwealth Teacher-Training Study and to determine if empirical sortings will cluster "competencies" into categories that support those developed logically through prior investigation. The population for this study consisted of two pools of teacher competencies: The present-day "Florida Teacher Competency List" and the Commonwealth Study. Samples of fifty items were drawn from the two lists and matched for content. The sets were judged to determine equivalency of items. Sets of fifty items alternating between Florida and Commonwealth were given to forty volunteer teachers to be sorted into groups that they saw as describing the same aspects of teaching. Data from the sortings were interpreted and ten categories determined from the Commonwealth material and eleven from the Florida list. The categories seemed to follow quite clearly from the content of the statements defining the categories. Results of the analyses and the categorization of items from two different populations seem to indicate that a high degree of relationship exists between these two sets of items. The second question is not as well supported because only four of the latent categories matched similar logical categories. The results tend to support a connection between past theory and practice in teacher education and the present movement in competency based teacher education. While the results do not support the established logical categories of competencies, the methodology employed seems to be a suitable tool for investigating the structure of these sets of competencies. (Author/MB)