Selected aspects of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 with implications for industrial arts teacher-education

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine how adequately industrial arts teacher preparation programs prepare prospective teachers with respect to Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHAct) standards pertinent to public secondary school industrial arts laboratories. One objective of the study was to assess agreement of industrial arts teacher educators (ITE's) and Certified Safety Professionals (CSP's) (United States Office of Education Region VI) concerning the importance of OSHAct standards relevant to industrial arts laboratory activities. The other major objective was to determine adequacy of the industrial arts teacher education curriculum relative to each OSHAct standard. The sample of 27 industrial arts teacher educators represents 27 of the 31 institutions in Region VI. A total of 59 Certified Safety Professionals responded from a random sample of 100 residing in Region VI. Research followed these steps: (1) determination of the standards relevant to public secondary school industrial arts laboratory activities, (2) validation of selected standards by submitting them to the 13 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) area directors in Region VI, (3) submission of validated questionnaires to CSP's and ITE's in Region VI for their estimate of potential importance to industrial arts activities, and the ITE's were asked to respond on curricular adequacy relative to identified standards, (4) synthesis of data. Measures of assigned importance by CSP's and ITE's were subjected to single classification analysis of variance. The study included 43 standards. A significant difference of opinion at the .05 level existed between CSP's and ITE's for 13 standards. Eight of 15 or 54% of subpart H, Hazardous Materials, two of 11 or 18% of subpart I, Personal Protective Equipment, and three of 17 or 18% of subpart 0, Machinery and Machine Guarding standards were found to elicit significant differences of opinion. An adequacy decision rule was used to rank the 43 standards in terms of current (1977) curricular adequacy. Machinery and machine guarding standards ranked highest in terms of adequacy. Personal protective equipment ranked lowest in curricular adequacy...