Teachers’ perceptions on school culture and school performance: a study of primary school in the District of Papar, Sabah

Abstract

This study was conducted to investigate the perceptions of primary school teachers’ on school culture and school performance in the District of Papar, Sabah. Five research questions guided the investigation for teachers’ perception and practices on school culture, based on Schein theoretical model of “Level of Culture and Their Interaction”. In this study, school cultures attribute addressed are in terms of professional collaboration, affilliative collegiality and self-determination. It also seeks to discover the effects of school cultures on students’ achievement and school performance. By referring at a variety of school culture concept, this study was to explore and to identify the direct / indirect influences of school culture on learning, look at teacher self-determination traits that impact on learning and consider school culture behavioural traits that lead to student achievement. This quantitative research using a survey questionnaire and were completed by 310 public elementary school teachers by using a simple random sampling technique which included three sections. Section A is about demographic of respondents, section B is about school culture triage survey which consists of the school culture attribute. While section C is about school performance in terms of academic, character and co-curricular. The Descriptive Statistics was used to examine the current level of school performance as perceived by teachers as well as the practices of the three school culture attribute among them. The Independent Sample t-Test was employed to investigate the difference among different types of school on perceived school performance. While the Pearson Product-Moment Bivariate Correlation Coefficient analysis was employed to investigate if there was significant relationship between perceived schools performances with school culture factors. In addition, the Multiple Regression analysis was used to study the extent of the school culture attribute predicts the school performance. The findings of the study indicate that the current perceived school performances are at moderate level. This study also found that the relationship between school culture and school performance is statistically significant differences among different type of school. All of the three school culture attribute show a high level on the current level that is practiced by the teachers. The correlation analysis indicates that school performance is significantly and positively related with all school culture attributes. According to multiple regression analysis, it was found that there are two predictors which are statistically significant in explaining the variations in the dependent variable. In conclusion, the study suggests greater collective research should be performed targeting the traits of successful school culture leading to student achievement.