Impacts of teacher trainings to modify teachers’ attitude towards corporal punishment

Abstract

The tool traditionally used by school teachers for learning and disciplining the students is corporal punishment. The said research was designed to identify the primary school teacher’s attitude towards corporal punishment and then search out the most effective way for implementing strategies for modification of teachers’ attitudes towards corporal punishment. This was a multi-stage study. At first phase, survey was conducted to identify the teachers having highly positive attitude towards corporal punishment. In the first phase, a four-point Likert scale containing 21 positive and negative statements towards corporal punishment was used to check the attitude towards corporal punishment. The targeted population of the study was all the government boys primary school teachers (785) in Tehsil Kot Chutta, District Dera Ghazi Khan. A total of 260 teachers were selected for the study sample. Then 140 primary school teachers having the most positive attitude towards corporal punishment were selected and equally divided into two groups and then each group was equally sub-divided in control and treatment groups. Combination of attitude modification strategies by two different modes (face-to-face workshop and virtual/online treatment) were applied to treatment groups. t-test was applied to measure statistically significant difference between control group and experimental group. The study results show that most of the teachers were inclined towards corporal punishment. Teachers’ attitudes could be reduced by some strategies like face-to-face workshops for teachers and online training for teachers to modify of positive attitude of teachers toward corporal punishment. Scholars tested strategies by two different modes and found both were decent, but the face-to-face training strategy was more effective than online workshops. It is recommended that frequent training sessions may be conducted to change teachers’ attitude towards corporal punishment on regular bases.