of well-functioning families.
The population from which the sample will be drawn will consist of all teachers and all students involved in the team teaching approach at Marshall Middle School; this includes the 26 regular education teachers and 463 sixth, seventh and eighth graders, all of whom were involved in the program. Special education students will not be included in the study.
No teachers or students will be forced to participate in the study. Thus, only volunteers will serve as subjects. According to Kiess and Bloomquist (1985), the use of a volunteer sample can limit the study in that volunteers tend to have somewhat different characteristics than non-volunteers. Thus, it is possible that the findings of the study regarding the perceptions and opinions of students and teachers may only be generalizable to the volunteering subset of the population.
Students and teachers will be required to complete questionnaires designed to assess their degree of satisfaction with their experiences in the team teaching program at Marshall Middle School and their opinions of program outcomes. The questionnaire that will be given to teachers is presented in Appendix A and the questionnaire that will be given to students is presented in Appendix B. Both of these questionnaires are presented in first draft form and, as can be seen from examination of these instruments, they essentially consist of replicate questions, the purpose of which is to allow statistical comparisons between teachers and students responses.
Since the questionnaires are researcher-designed instruments, several steps will be taken to boost their reliability and validly. All of these steps are those recommended by Best (1991) for teacher-designed survey instruments.
The first step that will be taken to boost the psychometric soundness of the instruments will be to show them to a panel of educators who will be asked to review both questionnaires and m...