A study of safety attitudes and instructional practices of industrial arts teachers in the State of Virginia

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between teachers' safety attitudes and their instructional practices and to determine the relationship between teachers’ safety attitudes and instructional practices and the number of years of teaching and work experience they had gained.

A survey instrument composed of an Attitude Inventory, an Instructional Practices Inventory, and a section on number of years of teaching and work experience was constructed and tested for this study. A panel of experts assisted in validating the content of the survey instrument and the grouping of items into the six categories: Safety Responsibility, Liability, Directing Learning, Laboratory Organization, Teaching Aids, and Pupil Personnel Services, Reliability was established through computation of the Cronbach Alpha coefficients. The survey instrument was mailed to a random selection of 285 of the 1068 industrial arts teachers listed in the Virginia Industrial Arts Teachers! Directory, 1978-79.

Pearson correlation coefficients were computed for responses on the Attitude Inventory with those on the Instructional Practices Inventory for the Liability Category, the Teaching Aids Category and for the overall scores on each inventory. Additionally, correlations were computed for years of teaching experience and years of industrial work experience with responses on the Safety Attitude Inventory and the Instructional Practices Inventory overall and for two categories. The categories used in those comparisons were those which were found to have a meaningful reliability coefficient, Liability and Teaching Aids. Each of the total inventories had meaningful reliability coefficients.

The analysis of data revealed little if any correlation (0.20) between overall responses to the Safety Attitude Inventory and overall responses to the Instructional Practices Inventory and little if any correlation between attitudes and instructional practices in the categories--Liability (0.17) and Teaching Aids (0.12). No significant relationship was found between number of years of teaching experience and overall responses to the Safety Attitude Inventory or to the Instructional Practices Inventory.

No significant relationship was found between number of years of industrial work experience and overall responses to the Safety Attitude Inventory or to the Instructional Practices Inventory. Little if any correlation (0.19) was found between the Liability category of the Safety Attitude Inventory and work experience, and little if any correlation was found between the Liability category (0.17) and the Teaching Aids category (0.15) of the Instructional Practices Inventory and work experience.

From the analysis of data it was concluded that:

1. Safety attitudes expressed by industrial arts education teachers may not be considered as predictors of their instructional practices relating to safety.

2. Industrial work experience is not an important variable in determining the safety attitudes or instructional practices of industrial arts education teachers.

3. The number of years of teaching experience gained by industrial arts education teachers has no effect on safety attitudes or instructional practices of industrial arts education teachers.