Administrators` and teachers` awareness of and interest in the archivement of ISO 9000 certification in Kuala Lumpur

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate administrators' and teachers' awareness of ISO 9000 and their interest in the achievement of the certification in Kuala Lumpur. Correlation between awareness and interest and the variation in responses according to the participants' demographic characteristics were examined. The instrument used was a self-constructed questionnaire. The validity and reliability of the questionnaire were tested and results showed Cronbach Alpha valued at 0.8490 for 'awareness' and 0.6109 for 'interest'. Multistage cluster sampling was applied and a total of 30 administrators and. 542 teachers representing 10% of the population in four different zones in Kuala Lumpur participated in the study. Data was analysed using SPSS to determine the frequency, percentage and means of the variables. Hypotheses were tested using Chi-square and Kendall-Tau. The findings indicated that most of the respondents showed a fair level of awareness and interest. However, a comparison of responses revealed that more administrators than teachers showed high level of awareness· and interest. The results of the hypotheses testing showed significant differences between their awareness of ISO 9000 as well as their interest in the achievement of the certification. There was a significant positive correlation between teachers' awareness and their interest but not between administrators' awareness and interest. It was also found that there were no significant differences between respondents' age, gender, number of years of teaching and academic qualification in the level of awareness and interest except teaching experience in regard to the interest. There is a need for further research to increase teachers' awareness and. interest in the achievement of the ISO 9000 certification.