Colleges of education teachers excel in licensure exam — Study

Trained teachers from the colleges of education performed better than those from the universities in the Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination (GTLE) so far conducted, a research has revealed.

According to the study conducted by a team of six researchers from the University of Education, Winneba (UEW) from 2021 to 2022, the pass rate of those from the colleges was 79 per cent, while that for those from the universities was 71 per cent.

The research, which was carried out from August 2021 to February 2022, involved over 3,000 respondents who had written the GTLE from 2018 to 2021.

A Senior Lecturer in Curriculum and Pedagogy at the UEW, Dr Richardson Addai-Mununkum, who presented the research report on An Evaluation of the GTLE in Accra Thursday, told the Daily Graphic’s Emmanuel Bonney that the results were interesting.

He said the purpose of the research was to evaluate the GTLE against its original purpose, identify emerging challenges and make recommendations for improvement.

Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination
The GTLE was introduced by the government in 2019, backed by the Education Act of 2008, Act 778, with the first-ever teacher licensure examination taking place in September 2018.

It is an examination organised to license and certify all professional teachers in Ghana as a key policy aimed at improving the professional standing and status of teachers in the country.

Organised and supervised by the National Teaching Council (NTC), the licensure examination is also aimed at building the expertise of teachers in the field of teaching and preparing them for appointments outside the country.

It covers new teachers entering the service, as well as teachers already in active service who also require the licence to practise the profession successfully.

The examination is conducted in three areas — Essential Professional Skills (EPSs), Literacy and Numeracy — after which successful candidates qualify for recruitment into the Ghana Education Service (GES) and posting.

Interesting findings

Dr Addai-Mununkum said the results were interesting because in terms of societal positioning, “we assume that the universities are higher and so we expect their candidates for the GTLE to do better”.

“So it is interesting that the colleges are actually doing better at the licensure. The reason we found was that the colleges really prepared the learners in relation to the National Teachers Standards (NTS), while in the universities a lot of programmes focused so much on the content areas,” he said.

He also said 53 per cent of those who took the examination but failed said it was a good exercise.

He added that about a quarter of the respondents had reservations about the numeracy aspect of the GTLE, since they needed to pass all three areas — EPSs, Literacy and Numeracy — before getting the licence.

source: graphiconline