DIFFUSION OF EDUCATIONAL INNOVATIONS IN THE GOVERNMENT SECONDARY SCHOOLS OF THAILAND
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Date
1968
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Publisher
University of Agricultural Sciences GKVK, Bangalore
Abstract
This study was designed:
1. to determine how decisions to adopt or reject new educational
practices for utilization in Thai government secondary
schools are made by officials in the Ministry of
Education.
2. to determine how educational Innovations are diffused to,
and why they are adopted or rejected by, government secondary
school teachers in Thailand.
3. to determine the degree of beneficiality perceived by Thai
government secondary school teachers to be derived from
adoption of selected innovations.
4. to delineate those personal, interpersonal or perceptual
variables—if any—which can be identified as contributing
to or inhibiting receptivity to change of government secondary
school teachers in Thailand.
5. to formulate for consideration by change agents and scholars
recommendations leading to improvement in the ability of
Thailand's government secondary education system to absorb,
diffuse, and adopt new educational practices.
An attempt is made to test more than 150 hypotheses predicting
directional relationships between fifty independent and three dependent (1) demographic variables; (2) perceptual variables; (3) communication
variables; (4) psychological and personality variables. The
three dependent variables are: (1) time of awareness; (2) time of
adoption; (3) perceived beneficiality of the innovations.
Pearsonian product-moment correlation coefficients and leastsquares
delete analyses were employed to test the predicted relationships
between independent and dependent variables.
Pre-coded questionnaires wer e administered to 629 government
secondary school teachers, employed by 38 schools in 32 Provinces.
Thirty-two secondary school principals and 62 Provincial Education
Officers also completed questionnaires, although the data derived
therefrom are not analyzed or reported. Interviews were conducted
wi t h numerous Ministry of Education officials in B angkok and at P r o vincial
Education Offices; the information derived from interviews
constitutes the basis of a chapter dealing with "Social Norms and
Bureaucratic Management of Education in Thailand."
The following ten innovations were selected for study: (1) use
of Peace Corps Volunteers as teachers; (2) teaching of handicrafts;
(3) formation of Parent-Teacher A ssociations; (4) employment of g u i d ance
counseling; (5) organization of the school into departments;
(6) use of slide projectors and slides; (7) coeducational organization;
(8) use of objective tests; (9) employment of class discussion;
(10) assignment of reading in library books. Seventeen of the fifty independent variables wer e found to correlate significantly vith awareness at the 5 per cent confidence
level. Twenty of the fifty independent variables vere found
to correlate significantly with adoption at the 5 per cent confidence
level. Biirty of the fifty independent variables were found
to correlate significantly with perceived beneficiality of Innovations
at the 5 per cent confidence level.
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No. of references 75