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The purpose of this study was to investigate self-efficacy and organizational efficacy as reported by assistant principals for relationships to their job preparation experiences in one K-12 public school district. Bandura defined self-efficacy as "]belief in one's capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments" (1997, p. 3). Organizational efficacy has been defined as "an aggregated judgment of an organization's individual members' assessment of their (a) collective capacities, (b) mission or purpose, and (c) sense of resilience" (Bohn, 2010, p. 233). As efficacious beliefs have reciprocal influence that can better fortify performance (Bandura, 1997), this study explored both self-efficacy and organizational efficacy to provide a bi-level depiction of assistant principal efficacy. The self-efficacy measurement was gathered through the 2006 School Administrator Efficacy Scale (SAES) survey (McCollum, Kajs, and Minter, 2006a, 2006b) and the organizational efficacy measurement was gathered through the 2010 Organizational Efficacy Scale (OES) survey (Bohn, 2010). Additionally, self-reported demographics and job preparation experiences were gathered through a participant information survey. Beyond descriptive analyses that established benchmarking efficacy measurements for the participating school district, ANOVA analyses revealed no significant relationships in self-reported self-efficacy or organizational efficacy based upon the job preparation experiences of assistant principals. The benchmarking measurements were presented to inform school district leaders as they direct future district succession, mentoring, or professional development planning for increased efficacious leadership development and for improved human capital management results. Ed. D.

The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the experiences, educational and job related, that middle school assistant principals have received to prepare, and to become principals. In order to explore and describe those experiences provided by the middle school principals a phenomenological research design was used for this study. Those participants who were interviewed work in middle schools within Region V of the Virginia School University Partnership. This research project included two steps in data collection. The first step required the assistant principals to examine the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium Standards (ISLLC), and indicate whether they had experienced those functions under each standard in one or more of three areas: principal preparation, job responsibility, and district professional development. The second parts of the study involved follow up interview questions for each in the participants. The findings of the study discuss that the standards are addressed and also how the assistant principals feel about their preparation and school district professional development. Ed. D.

The major purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the instructional leadership role and responsibilities of middle school assistant principals and their level of involvement in instructional leadership. Specifically, this study determined the extent of involvement of the middle school assistant principal as an instructional leader in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The data gathered compared instructional leadership tasks to various demographic variables and determined the amount of time spent performing the instructional leadership tasks. The Sources of Instructional Leadership(SOIL) survey instrument was revised and used in addition to a demographic survey to collect the data. A total of 396 surveys were mailed to middle school assistant principals across the state of Virginia. The SOIL survey includes 31 instructional leadership tasks that describe the instructional leadership responsibilities of assistant principals. The research design is non-experimental and descriptive. The methodology was a modification of the methodology used in a study conducted by Bush (1997). The design used a demographic survey, the SOIL survey and time study to collect data. The data collected answered the following research questions: 1. What instructional leadership roles and responsibilities are performed by middle school assistant principals in Virginia? 2. What is the relationship between instructional leadership responsibilities performed and specific demographic variables? 3. How much time do middle school assistant principals spend on instructional issues each week? Conclusions from the data reveal the primary instructional leadership responsibilities of Virginia middle school assistant principals are: (1) developing a school climate that is conducive to learning (2) improving student discipline, and (3) communicating a concern for student achievement. The data also indicate that older assistant principals are more involved in observing and evaluating staff than younger assistant principals. Additionally, the study found that the more instructional leaders in a school, the more involved assistant principals are with tasks that are associated with developing an academic climate. Furthermore, almost 80% of the participants indicated they spent between 10-30% of their instructional task time developing an academic climate each week. Nearly 50% of the participants spent the least amount of time on tasks that focus on coordinating the instructional program. Ph. D.