Adequacy of pre-service teacher education for teaching physical education curriculum in public primary schools: A study of teachers from six selected educational circuits

Abstract

Pre-service teacher education programme should aim at adequate preparation of pre-service teachers to equip them with pedagogical and content knowledge relevant for full-time teaching career. However, a major obstacle to quality education is that several teachers are not well prepared to teach the school curriculum competently. Therefore, the study examined: 1) adequacy of pre-service teacher education for teaching the physical education (PE) programme, 2) relationship between adequacy of pre-service teacher education in PE and the frequency at which PE lessons were taught, and 3) relationship between adequacy of pre-service teacher education in PE and teacher-related barriers to teaching PE in public primary schools. The study design was cross-sectional survey. Multistage sampling technique yielded a sample of 172 subjects out of estimated population of 300. Validated and reliable self-structured questionnaire was used for data collection. Pre-data analyses were performed to clean data from errors. All data were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS for Windows, Version 17). The study found that several teachers received inadequate knowledge in teaching physical education programme in public primary schools. From the study, positive correlation was found between pre service teacher education in PE and the frequency at which PE lessons were taught. The study also revealed a negative correlation between quality of pre-service teacher education in PE and teacher-related barriers that hindered effective teaching of PE programme in public primary schools of the six selected circuits involved in the study.