Comparison of Vocational Commitment and Professional Competence of Teachers with and without experience of participating in Action Research

The organization of education, in order to fulfill its high goals, that is, the education of human beings, requires attentive, committed, and professional teachers. The purpose of this study was comparison of vocational commitment and professional competence of teachers with and without experience of participating in action research in elementary schools in Shiraz. The present study is an analytical-comparative study. The statistical population of this study is all teachers of elementary schools in Shiraz, who taught in the academic year 2016-17. The sample consisted of 56 teachers (28 with and 28 without experience of participating in action research) who were selected in the simple non-random (targeted) sampling. The questionnaires that used in this study were Rothwell & Arnold vocational commitment questionnaire with 9 items and Babaei professional competence questionnaire with 39 items. Validity and reliability of the questionnaires were examined and the results showed that the measurement tools had acceptable content validity. Data were analyzed by SPSS software package and used descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (Boxes test, Levenss test, Multivariate tests (Pillais Trace, Wilks Lambda, Hotelling trace, Roys Largest Root) and independent t-test. The results showed that the mean of vocational commitment and professional competence of teachers with experience of participating in action research were more than that of teachers without experience of participating in action research. Also, there was a significant difference between the dimensions of professional competence (cognitive-skills competence, attitudinal competence, managerial competence) between the two groups of teachers.