Thesis Abstract and Dissertation Abstracts

The study is an attempt to explore the possibilities of arriving at a set of critical process indicators to measure the quality of secondary teacher education programme. Critical process indicators are the process indicators which would be regularly influential on the quality of teacher education programme but less in number and is intended to give almost similar results about quality, which is measured by lengthy procedures of accreditation agencies. The present study, that had been undertaken, was a pioneering work in the respective field. Even though various agencies had done voluminous work on developing quality indicators for various educational and other sectors that offer service to customers, this type of a work, which was intended to identify the critical process indicators of quality teacher education programme (especially in Indian context) had not been so far undertaken as was evident from the related literature.

1.   To arrive at a consolidated set of process indicators of quality teacher education programme by a study of

                                               i.      Various process indicators published by organisations dealing with quality assurance in teacher education programme.

                                             ii.      Research studies on teacher education particularly dealing with quality of teacher education programme.

                                           iii.      Theories of teaching learning

2.   To develop a set of perceived process indicators of quality teacher education programme based on the ‘perception’ of experts in the field of education.

3.   To develop a set of practiced process indicators from the set of perceived process indicators based on the inputs provided by the teacher educators of the institutions with proven excellence.

4.   To formulate a set of process indicators that are critical to the quality of teacher education programme from the ‘practiced’ process indicators suggested by various teacher educators of teacher education institutions with proven excellence.

The methodological design of the study was exploratory in nature and purposive sampling was adopted wherever required. The study is divided in to three stages: 1) Developing consolidated set of process indicators, 2) Identifying perceived process indicators through the perception of experts in the field of teacher education in India and 3) Refining the perceived indicators further on the basis of regularity of practice of these indicators in the institutions of proven excellence. The content validity ratio (CVR) was used for data analysis.

The study found that almost 178 indicators are associated with teacher education programme’s quality under 13 separate processes.  Analysis of data collected through perception of experts resulted in the formulation of 76 perceived process indicators spread across 13 processes. Out of initially identified 178 indicators under 13 processes, about 42% of indicators are perceived as essential contributors for quality by experts. Analysis of data of the third stage resulted in the identification of 35 practiced process indicators under 13 processes, which is about 46% of indicators identified as essential by experts. The 35 indicators were identified as practiced regularly by all the teacher education institutions with proven excellence and obviously contributed to the overall quality of a teacher education programme (which helped them to become an institution with proven excellence) and hence were considered as critical.

If these indicators are used after refinement, it would be possible to measure the quality of a teacher education programme with a smaller number of indicators and to have a result almost similar to that measured through lengthy procedures and large number of indicators of external quality assurance agencies.