High school teachers' perceptions of school change and its implications for student achievement

This study attempted to observe if there was a statistical significant relationship between perceptions of educational change and student achievement. The independent variables that represented perceptions of educational change included: community pressure for change, faculty anxiety to change, faculty openness to change, principal anxiety to change, and principal openness to change. The dependent variables that represented student achievement included: eleventh grade math TAKS score, cohort completion rates, and math college readiness scores. The student achievement scores were collected by the Academic Excellence Indicator System (AEIS) reports provided by the Texas Education Agency web site.

This study sample consisted of thirty-eight high schools. The TCT survey was administered to certified teachers at the participating high schools. A total of 3,556 teachers completed the surveys. Descriptive statistics were prepared for both the educational change and student achievement data. After analysis of the descriptive statistics, a correlation was employed to indicate any statistically significant relationships. Finally, a multiple regression was utilized to determine the best predictor of student achievement.

The correlation indicated that community pressure for change and faculty anxiety had a statistically significant relationship with all variables of student achievement. In addition, the multiple regression indicated that community pressure for change was the best predictor of student achievement.