A comparative study of tasks performed by secondary vocatonal and academic teachers in West Tennessee

The purpose of this study was to identify the time spent by secondary teachers in the public school systems of West Tennessee fulfilling their job responsibilities and to compare the time spent by vocational and academic teachers on each job responsibility.

This nonexperimental study was conducted by mailing a questionnaire of frequently assigned teacher responsibilities to a randomly selected population of secondary vocational and academic teachers in the public school systems of West Tennessee. The subjects were requested to fill in the actual time spent by them in fulfilling the responsibilities listed on the questionnaire. The vocational and academic responses were tabulated for total time, mean and standard deviations. Comparisons as to the percentage of academic and vocational subjects performing each duty and the time spent completing each duty were also computed.

Major findings of the study were that vocational teachers do have at least five extra duties assigned to them by law and that these duties do result in additional clock hours of work. Vocational teachers do spend more time fulfilling their job responsibilities than do the academic teachers.

Recommendations for use of the information resulting from this study included the following:

Additional studies are necessary to substantiate the findings.

The questionnaire could be revised to limit duties requiring time estimates (via scaled responses) for extracurricular duties only.

The results need to be shared with fellow educators, the public, the politicians and school administrators.