The search for open education in Nova Scotia : a survey of seven randomly selected Halifax County schools with a comparison to schools in Cape Breton Island and the United States

Abstract

This study is an attempt to identify and compare the extent to which certain practices pertaining to open education are implemented in a sample of randomly selected Halifax County elementary schools. Open education is what is measured by the practices listed in such a questionnaire. The most suitable model discovered in my research was the Walberg-Thomas Observation Questionnaire and the parallel Teacher Questionnaire. My sampled comprised 168 teachers. The pilot testing involved 66 university student teachers, 44 secondary level teachers, whose expert advice gave the “traditional school” baseline for the study, and 58 Halifax County elementary teachers. The student teachers and senior high teachers completed the Pavan-LeGendre questionnaire while the elementary teachers completed both the Walberg-Thomas and the Pavan-LeGendre measures. Questionnaire results tentatively established concurrent validity for the Pavan-LeGendre scales. A Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient obtained between the Pavan-LeGendre and the Walberg-Thomas [underlined lowercase r] = .65 was significant at the p < .01 level. In the measurement of the implementation of continuous progress, it was found that elementary schools of Halifax County were more open than the traditional, graded school as imagined by the secondary level school teachers and slightly less open than LeGendre (1975) found the schools in Cape Breton Island to be. With respect to the classroom as researched by Walberg-Thomas (1971), Halifax County elementary schools were less open than the traditional classroom in the United States. Practices implementation of which is significantly higher or significantly lower than the traditional schools on each of the two models were distinguished. This compilation of distinctive practices should provide guidance to areas in which further work is necessary.