Education Minister reacts to ‘teachers’ GTLE performance report

The Minister for Education, Dr Adutwum has commended a team of researchers from the University of Cape Coast, the University of Education and AAMUSTED who conducted a study on the performance of teachers in the Ghana teacher licensure examination.

Dr Adutwum’s commendation comes he meet the Registrar of the National Teaching Council, Christian Addai Poku and the team of researchers who conducted the report on the evaluation of the GTLE and teacher professionalism.

The lecturers in their study revealed that trained teachers from public Colleges of Education (CoE) perform better than university teachers in the Ghana teacher licensure examination (GTLE), a national examination administered by NTC.

In the study piloted 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.

In a blog post sighted by AcademicWeek on UEW’s website, the GTLE performance 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.

Speaking to the Daily Graphic on the report, a Senior Lecturer in Curriculum and Pedagogy at the UEW, Dr Richardson Addai-Mununkum, said the ambition of the research was to evaluate the GTLE against its original purpose.

“The purpose of the research was to evaluate the GTLE against its original purpose, identify emerging challenges and make recommendations for improvement,” the UEW lecturer told the newspaper after presenting the research report.

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 Ghana teacher licensure examination 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.

The Senior lecturer said although the processes and procedures for the conduct of the teacher licensure examination (GTLE) were fit for purpose, there were a few challenges associated with registration and test administration.

He suggested that the management of the National Teaching Council (NTC) increase test-takers’ choice of centres for the writing of the national examination and improve the orientation and training of supervisors and invigilators.

“The NTC should undertake sensitisation and publicity campaigns on the GTLE. Such campaigns may include stakeholder fora and a documentary that could be aired on national television for a period,” the UEW official said.