Responsibility for student achievement

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2.2.1.2 Responsibility for student achievement

The responsibility for student achievement RSA was developed by Guskey shortly after the Rand publication on the analysis of preferred reading programs. In general this scale was aimed at measuring the level of teachers‘ responsibility for student achievement. In this scale, Guskey 1981 proposed four types of causes of the success and failure of the students. They were the teaching ability, the efforts put into teaching, the task difficulty and the luck Guskey, 1981. This 30-item scale was in the form of an alternative-weighting procedure in which participants were asked to assign a percentage of weight to every choice out of two alternatives. The alternatives, which Guskey stated to be internal, were designated by an R . Positive-even items were indicated by a plus sign and negative items by a minus sign following the R . The percentage the participants should assign ranged up to 100 Guskey, 1981. In his later studies, Guskey made a revision on his RSA scale and reduced the weight assigned to the responses to a 10-point scale Guskey, 1987. The RSA scale was scored by averaging the weights assigned to the internal responsibility alternatives across items. Scores resulting from the RSA comprised the overall scores on how much the teacher assumed the responsibility for student outcome, which was the combination of R+ and R- scores, and two subscale sores on the teacher responsibility for student success, which was the average of the R+ scores, and the teacher responsibility for student failure, which was the average of the R- scores. 31 In the comparison between the overall R , the R+ and R- scores, Guskey found their inter-correlation was high because the overall R scores represented the averaged sum of scores from the R+ and R – subscores Guskey, 1981. On the other hand, Guskey also found that the inter-correlations between the R+ and R- subscales were weak, only .203. Based on these findings, Guskey claimed that instead of being at two opposite ends of a single continuum, the positive and negative performance outcomes represented two separate dimensions and operated independently in their influence on the perception of self-efficacy Guskey, 1987. Further, Guskey also believed that the use of the R score alone without taking the scores of the two separate subscales was inadequate.

2.2.1.3 Teacher Locus of Control