Abstract (eng)
Most reform efforts in education are implemented without the use of evidence- based practices, which leads to reform implementation in schools that are simply not ready to reform. This thesis promotes the use of evidence-based practices, especially during pre-implementation. To this end, the author constructed an instrument to assess school conditions favorable to reform success, including teacher satisfaction, professional community, intensity of teacher collaboration, and general willingness to innovate, and compared them to levels of reactance, as well as both implicit and explicit attitudes towards a current educational initiative. A representative sample (in terms of age and gender) of 248 NMS public schoolteachers in Lower Austria showed that professional community, teacher satisfaction, and general willingness to innovate all play significant roles in educational reforms. A linear regression analysis revealed that professional community predicts teacher satisfaction, and that teacher satisfaction, in turn, predicts willingness to innovate. Furthermore, a mediation analysis found that implicit attitudes towards a reform played a mediating role in two relationships, between willingness to innovate and reactance to reform, as well as between reactance and explicit attitude towards reform. This indicates that how teachers implicitly feel about a reform’s fundamental concepts only plays a minor role in the emergence of reactance and explicit negative attitudes. This underscores the power of reactance and the importance of carefully implemented reform efforts in an educational context.