Evaluation and the Administrator: How Decisions are Made

Abstract

The investigator describes how principals, supervisors, and central office personnel made decisions in public school reading programs. The study compares the actual decision-making processes with a theoretical model of rational decision making. Typical decisions for administering and supervising a school reading program were obtained from job descriptions and from literature in reading education. Test subjects identified their respective decisions. Through interviews, these administrators and supervisors described the processes by which their identified decisions had been made and compared the descriptions with a representative rational model of decision-making in order to determine how real life decision-making processes approximated a theoretical model. Regardless of staff position, there appeared to be no difference in group ability to identify respective administrative decisions. Analysis of the actual decision-making processes employed by administrators indicated an incomplete awareness of a rational decision-making prescription. Past experience and intuition, rather than attempts to identify alternative actions and to weigh these for relative merit, were the basis of the greatest number of decisions.