Quality Assurance Practices Applied in PTTCs: Listening to the Student Teachers’ Voice Through Focus Group Discussion

Edward Kigozi

doi:10.22521/edupij.2020.91.2

Abstract

Quality Assurance Practices Applied in PTTCs: Listening to the Student Teachers’ Voice Through Focus Group Discussion

Highlights

With an anticipated increase in the number of student teachers worldwide from 100 million in 2000 to a projected 263 million by 2025, coupled with the ever-expanding globalization and marketization of education, ensuring the quality of teacher education is one of the major investment areas in ensuring the quality and expected standards of education provision in both the developing and the developed world (Abdel-Karim & Helou, 2013; Ingvarson & Rowley, 2017)
The main purpose of the current study is to provide a detailed students’ perspective on quality assurance (QA) practices applied in Uganda’s Primary Teacher Training colleges (PTTCs), and the challenges faced by these institutions whilst implementing QA practices, through performing an inquiry of the primary stakeholder; student teachers enrolled at PTTCs
The current study revealed that the student teachers and their learning was at the center of implementing QA practices in the PTTCs

Summary

Introduction

With an anticipated increase in the number of student teachers worldwide from 100 million in 2000 to a projected 263 million by 2025, coupled with the ever-expanding globalization and marketization of education, ensuring the quality of teacher education is one of the major investment areas in ensuring the quality and expected standards of education provision in both the developing and the developed world (Abdel-Karim & Helou, 2013; Ingvarson & Rowley, 2017). Due to the aforementioned factors, issues such as mobility of students, distance education, use of technology in education, virtual education, and the introduction of cost-sharing and privatization in education have all been witnessed. All these have led to a growing need and demand for quality assurance (QA) in various educational institutions as well as in teacher education institutions. Several processes to ensure the quality of teaching and learning in teacher education institutions have been implemented, and some of these include “accreditation,” “quality assessment,” “use of performance indicators” and “selfevaluation.” These QA processes have been prescribed within various QA frameworks and by QA agencies in general across in various countries worldwide. It is believed that QA is an important tool for teacher education institutions and other tertiary education institutions so as to achieve academic excellence, implementing QA practices to ensure the quality of academic programs in meeting both local and international standards is still considered a challenge, especially in developing countries (Kahsay, 2012; Ryan, 2015; Schomaker, 2015)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion