Dissertation Defense Announcement

The College of Education announces the Final Dissertation of

Josie Currie

for the Degree of Doctor of Education

April 5, 2018 at 11:30 AM in Ball Hall, Room 123

Advisor: Reginald Green

The Relationship between Perceived Implementation of Green's Four-Dimensional Model of Educational Leadership and Students' Proficiency in Basic Skills

ABSTRACT:The purpose of this study is to investigate relationships between elementary-level educators' perceptions of their school's implementation of Green's four-dimensional model of educational leadership and the percentage of students proficient in Language Arts and in Mathematics, averaged over three years. Represented by responses to twenty items selected from the 2013 state-wide administration of the Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning survey in Tennessee (TELL Tennessee), school-level means at 1187 elementary schools were obtained for each of four five-item scales that were intended to measure each dimension of Green's model. Along with a grand mean computed across all twenty items and denoting a school's overall implementation of the model, all of these data were merged with student achievement outcomes archived by the Tennessee Department of Education and with information related to student and faculty demographic characteristics and employed as control variables. Consistent with previous research, student demographic characteristics proved to be the most important factors in explaining variation in student proficiency. The impact of these factors notwithstanding, higher perceived scores on Green's four-dimensional model of educational leadership nevertheless proved to be associated with higher percentages of proficient students at statistically significant levels, irrespective of subject matter. At the same time and consistent with the school effectiveness literature, it should be mentioned that the inclusion of the Leadership Dimensions scores tended to explain a systematically higher proportion of variance with respect to Mathematics outcomes than Language Arts outcomes.