Abstract
Purpose. The purpose of this study was to investigate the beliefs, attitudes and practices of the chief instructional officers (CIO's) of the California community colleges toward Continuous Quality Improvement in their colleges. It also explores their attitudes toward CQI and the extent to which CIO's use the tools and strategies commonly associated with CQI. Variables considered were the CIO's age, gender, length of experience as a CIO, training in administrative skills, the recency of that training, and extent of formal training in CQI. Methodology. A questionnaire was mailed to all (107) of the California community chief instructional officers. The number returned was eighty-five. The questionnaire was divided into four sections addressing three major themes as well as demographic data about the CIO's. The three major themes were: CIO level of agreement with CQI philosophy and principles, CIO attitude towards CQI, and the level of CIO use of CQI tools and techniques. The data collected were tabulated and then cross-tabulated across the three major themes as well as the questionnaire statements and questions within those themes by the demographic variables. A statistical software package for the social sciences was used to analyze the data. Tests for significance were conducted using the ONEWAY Analysis of Variance followed by the Scheffe' or a simple t-test if only two independent variables were considered. Findings and conclusions. There is a generally high level of agreement with the philosophy and principles of CQI among the California community college CIO's. As a group, they have a fairly positive attitude towards CQI but they don't use CQI tools and strategies very much in their work. Although their responses differed by age, gender, length of service, education, etc., the differences were not significant with the exception in the amount of CQI training. CQI training did make a significant difference relative to the extent the CIO's used CQI tools and strategies. The data indicates that the CIO's are generally prepared and ready to assume leadership roles in their colleges to create a CQI environment that is customer and data driven, and based on collaboration and consensus among and between self-managed teams.