Expectation and Achievement Gap of Generic Competences among Students of Bachelor of Education (Honors)

Abstract

Education plays the significant role in social and economic development of humans by providing civilized and skilled manpower (Richta, 2018). Quality of education is intrinsically linked with the quality of teacher; which is further explained by the level of competence teachers have had during their whole period of schooling from early to higher education level (Gay, 2018). Therefore, importance of teacher training institution has never been considered overemphasised. More specifically, there is an increasingly high pressure on Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to equip future teachers with content specific competences as well as the generic competences (Kivistö, Pekkola et al., 2019). It is comprehensibly incumbent upon the governments to ensure quality of teacher education programmes. The Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan in their commitment and consistent endeavour has introduced Bachelor of Education (BEd Honors) programme in their HEIs to improve the quality of teacher education (Mahmood, 2017). This four years programme is expected to have imparted high level of students‟ competences. Since the inception of a new highly specialised teacher education programme (four year BEd Honors) in 2013, there is a heightened debate over the quality of the product. This new programme accepts 12 years of schooling as entry requirements. The graduates of BEd (Honors) have 16 years of schooling. Previously, there was a one year BEd Programme, which had been offered after 14 years of schooling. The graduates of older one year BEd programme had 15 years of schooling. It has now been stopped studiedly. The current study aimed at investigating into the expectation and achievement gap of generic competences among students of BEd (Honors). The survey research design was considered appropriate for the present study. Convergent mixed method research was used to execute the study. Public sector universities having BEd (Honors) from four provinces of Pakistan, namely, Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Baluchistan was the population of the study. Sample of the study was 16 universities selected randomly keeping in view the appropriate representation of these four provinces. From each sampled university, five teachers (80 in total), one Head of the Department (HoD) of Education (16 in total) and 30 students (480 in total) were selected. At each university, the researcher conducted one Focus Group Discussion (16 in total) among six to eight students. Total sample size was 621 respondents. There were four research tools to collect the data – Document analysis rubric, semi-structured interview schedule for HoDs and teachers, Focus Group Discussion (FGD) among students, and the questionnaire for students. The Questionnaire was adapted for this study. The scale was based on 19 generic competences, previously, developed for Reflex Project, an international project executed in fourteen European and one Asian country. Afterwards, it was used by Shah (2009) in France, validated by Shamim-ur-Rasul (2012) in Pakistan and immediately thereafter used by Rasheed (2013) at university level in Pakistan. Nevertheless, the researcher conducted pilot testing for her present project. The reliability of the tool calculated through Cronbach Alpha was 0.84. The tools were validated by the experts in the localised context of Pakistan. The data were collected by researcher personally and through research assistants. The descriptive and inferential statistics were applied to analyse the quantitative data in SPSS. The qualitative data were analysed through thematic analysis technique. The results of the study revealed that there was a gap in the expectation and achievement for all the generic competences among the students of BEd (Honors). The expected level of xiii generic competences was marked at high level; whereas, the achieved level was noted at the moderate level. The students recorded higher achieved level for these four competences (out of 19) – ability to work productively with others, ability to use computers and the internet, ability to make your meaning clear to others and ability to come up with new ideas and solutions. It was recommended that the teachers should focus on to enhance the generic competences of the students at BEd (Honors) at the expected as well as optimal level.