Personality and Interest Measures as Related to Criteria of Instructor Effectiveness

Abstract

THIS PROJECT is the first of a series devoted to the broad problem of selecting enlisted personnel for the job of tactical instructor in the Air Force basic training program. The specific problem of this project is to determine the degree of relationship between three criteria of in structor effectiveness: a student evaluation, a peer rating, a supervisor rating, and a number of personality and interest variables. The tactical instructor is in many ways unique among teachers. He is a teacher in the broadest sense of the word in that he employs a large variety of teaching techniques ranging from formal classroom lectures to such stu dent orientated activities as combat problems and field exerc i s e s and attempts to meet objectives ranging from developing simple skills to changing attitudes. The tactical instructor is also unique in that he main tains very close contact with his students for almost all of a long tr a i n ing day which extends from reveille to taps. He is scheduled for 3 91 hours of regularly scheduled training with the students in his flight during the eleven weeks of the basic training program. A considerable body of research attempting to relate personality characteristics to various criteria of teacher effectiveness maybe found in the literature. The Bernreuter Personality Inventory has been em ployed in a number of studies (7, 9,12,13,14,15). Mostof these studies have not uncovered statistically significant relationships between person ality measures and the criterion employed. In general, however, there appears to be a low negative relationship between neurotic tendency and instructor effectiveness and a low positive relationship between self suf ficiency and instructor effectiveness. The Bell Adjustment Inventory has also been employed in studies in this area (6, 8,12,13,14) and in gen eral shows a small positive relationship between good overall a dj us t ment and supervisor's ratings of instructor effectiveness with correla tions ranging from . 04 to . 40. Phillips (12) compared Bell Adjustment Inventory scores and average superintendent and principal ratings for 173 elementary and junior high school teachers and found a correlation of . 08 between good adjustment and the criterion. In two studies of stu dent teachers, Seagoe (13,14) found a correlation of . 40 between adjust ment score and practice teaching and . 31 between adjustment score and administrator rankings using the Bell Adjustment Inventory. Seagoe al so employed the Thurstone Personality Schedule in these two studies and