Pedagogical Science Practices in Public Higher Education Institutions of Ethiopia: Progresses Made but Challenges Remain

Abstract

In many countries, concerns have been raised about the quality and relevance of higher education. In the policy debates emerging as a consequence of these concerns, a lot of attention has been paid to the applicability and relevance of higher learning institutions in terms of addressing the felt needs of the country under consideration. The contribution of education to the overall development of a nation becomes evident especially through higher education. This is because higher education is considered a key to delivering the knowledge requirements for development. Studies reveal a strong positive correlation between higher education participation rates and levels of development, and that high levels of education are essential for the design and production of new technologies, for enhancing innovative capacities, and for the development of civil society. While the reforms of higher education in advanced economies have received much attention, relatively little is known about the change dynamics in higher education system in developing countries. Therefore, through this paper, I want to contribute to a better understanding of higher education system from the perspective of the type of pedagogy being practiced frequently and its consequences in producing competent graduates for the world of work in low-income countries by presenting the results of a study on higher education system in Africa by taking Ethiopian public higher education system as a case. To this end, selected higher education institutions’ officials and instructors were used as sources of data. Questionnaire, interviews, and observations were used as tools of data collection. The collected data were analyzed using mixed methodologies. Findings of the study revealed that despite the offering of on-job pedagogical science trainings in the sample universities, little progress has been made in the universities in terms of the type of pedagogy frequently employed by the instructors in instruction processes. In other words, the findings of the study revealed that most instructors of the sample higher education institutions still predominantly use teacher-centered pedagogy. Recommendations which are assumed to help the instructors’ use of active learning are forwarded in the research paper.