Consensus for Change in the Role of the Learning Resources Specialist: Order and Position Differences

Abstract

Specialized professional associations in education have, sometimes moved to expand the roles of their practitioners within the instructional organization of the school. Such changes, whether actual or proposed, provide an opportunityfor studying consensusfor the changed role. How to define role consensus, however, has been a problem for those doing research in the field. A descriptive scheme is presented here which integrates previous work. It involves two dimensions: order of consensus, and position of the parties who define consensus relative to one another. Distance measures (D2 and the Mahalanobis distance) may be particularly useful in describing consensus with respect to both order and position. Results of a study on proposed changes in the role of the learning resources specialist (LRS) indicated that significantly more consensus exists between LRSs and administrators than between LRSs and teachers. Significantly more consensus was also found when comparisons were made using respondents' personal reactions as opposed to reactions attributed by them to their own group of colleagues. The findings suggest that, under conditions of rapid change and consolidation in education, studies of role consensus may be useful to policy makers in defining areas in which change in educational roles could be accomplished more or less easily.