The Relationship Between Teacher Pupil Control Ideology and Elementary Student Attitudes in Navajo Schools.

Testing the hypothesis that there is a positive relationship between the degree of teacher humanism in pupil control ideology and the degree of favorable student attitude toward school, classmates, and teachers, comparisons were made relative to public and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) schools. Derived from 6 public and 7 BIA boarding schools located on the Navajo Reservation, the sample (91 teachers and 1,714 students) included usable responses to Willower's Pupil Control Ideology Form and Tenenbaum's Student Attitude Questionnaire Test administered in 1973. Employing Spearman's rho correlation coefficient and the Z test to determine correlation significance, teacher and student characteristics were analyzed in terms of age; sex; race; school type; teaching experience; etc. While results did not support the major hypothesis, significant findings were: (1) public school teachers were more custodial than BIA boarding school teachers; (2) BIA boarding school students had more favorable attitudes toward school than public school students; (3) females had more favorable attitudes toward school than males; (4) 14 year olds had more favorable attitudes toward school than either 12 or 13 year olds, and 15 year olds had more favorable attitudes than 12 year olds; (5) eighth grade students had more favorable attitudes than seventh grade students; and (6) American Indian students had more favorable attitudes toward school than non-Indian students. (JC)