The purpose of this study was to design a method to evaluate the process of community education and to test the new evaluative method in a small set of community education schools.
Based upon the review of the literature, a questionnaire was developed with the assistance of the researcher's advisory committee to evaluate the process of community education and submitted to a panel of experts for review and revision, and then field tested to gather data from the sample of community education schools involved in the study.
Four major categories of respondents were sampled from six community education schools drawn from the total population of 193 community education schools in the Mid-Atlantic region. The four categories of respondents included the community education coordinator, staff members, advisory council members, and community residents.
All the subjects in the sample were sent the developed questionnaire to collect data regarding their perceptions of the existence and importance of a systematic approach to meeting community needs, the way they were involved, and the extent of their involvement. A frequency distribution and percentage analysis were performed. The results were recorded and analyzed to produce the findings of the study.
The findings of the study were:
1. A method to evaluate the process of community education was developed and could effectively be administered by community education coordinators.
2. The developed method could determine the perceptions of four groups of respondents and their perception of the existence, importance, and extent of their involvement in the community education process.
3. The developed instrument could gather data to ascertain the involvement of people in the community education process in eight systematic approaches to meeting community needs.
4. The following conclusions were based on the findings of the study:
a. A majority of all the respondents indicated that a systematic approach to meeting community needs did exist.
b. The results of the findings indicated that a systematic approach to meeting community needs was important to all groups responding.
c. The majority of the staff and coordinators were involved in all approaches to meeting community needs. Community residents and advisory council members were split between a great deal of involvement and only some involvement in meeting community needs. Community residents perceived their involvement to be less than any other group of respondents.
d. Community residents and staff members indicated their greatest involvement was with the use of a questionnaire. Advisory council members believed their greatest involvement was by serving on the advisory council. The community education coordinators cited working on task-forces, working with the advisory council, and attending public meetings as the areas of their greatest involvement in meeting community needs. The coordinators were all involved in more than three ways, while the majority of the other three groups of respondents were involved in only one way.
e. The results indicated that sex was the only variable whereby the advisory council represented the community residents who were participating in the program at the time of this study. / Ed. D.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/106878 |
| Date | January 1978 |
| Creators | Strickland, Mary Lou |
| Contributors | Educational Administration |
| Publisher | Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation, Text |
| Format | viii, 125 leaves, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | OCLC# 14027615 |
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