Investigation On Relationship Between Teacher Quality Attributes And Literacy Skills Outcomes: A Case Of Public Primary Schools In Arusha-Tanzania

ABSTRACT

Reading and writing is critical to a child’s success in school and later in life because, it is one of the predictors to ascertain whether a child will function competently in school and actively engage and contribute in increasingly literate society. Despite many government initiatives, teachers have been reported to perform unsatisfactorily in classroom practices in reading and writing. The situation has led to 64% and 54% of standard 2 and 3 pupils unable to read and write as indicated by researches done. This study, therefore, set out to find out the relationship between teacher quality and pupils’ gain of literacy skills outcome. The current study was underpinned by Vygotsky’s socio-cultural development theory. The study was conducted in Arusha District Council. The research approach was Quantitative, and the research design was correlational. Stratified and simple random sampling techniques were used to select 55 respondents; 28 teachers from rural and 27 from urban public primary schools. Data for the study were collected by the use of questionnaire and observation schedule. Pearson correlation coefficient (r) was employed to measure the degree of the relationship between variables at a significant level of .05. The findings obtained from this study revealed that there is a significant relationship between teachers’ level of education attribute, teachers’ experience attribute, teachers’ pedagogical strategies attribute, teachers’ subject area competency attribute, and pupils’ gain of literacy skills outcomes. Overall, the results have revealed that there is a relationship between teacher quality and pupils’ gain of literacy skills outcome. It is expected that the findings of the current study will help the Ministry of Education Science and Technology in collaboration with other stakeholders to find out solutions to teacher quality related problems that hinder pupils’ gain of literacy skills outcome. Finally, these results could also serve as a springboard for other investigations in the same area.