A Study of Ghanaian Inclusive Basic School Teachers’ Perspectives and Uses of Research Evidence in Pedagogical Practice

Joseph Seyram Agbenyega, Deborah Tamakloe, Sunanta Klibthong and Hamdah Abdi Ibrahim Jibar

SAGE Open, 2023, vol. 13, issue 4, 21582440231216575

Abstract: International research findings offer inclusive education teachers various pedagogical tools to support student diversity in inclusive classrooms to counter educational disadvantages. However, according to previous research, embedding research evidence in pedagogical practice at the classroom level is rare in schools. Our study explored Ghanaian teachers’ perspectives in 10 purposively selected inclusive Basic Schools in Ghana. The study focused on teachers’ frequency of use of Research-Based Information (RBI), the type of use of RBI, opinions about RBI, awareness of useful activities that facilitate the use of RBI, individual expertise, or skills necessary for RBI use in everyday practice, organizational factors that influence the use of RBI. The study identified non-use and minimal to moderate use of RBI in professional practice. Sources of RBI were mostly from non-scholarly journals because the schools did not subscribe to peer-reviewed journals, and teachers were not willing to use their financial resources to access close-ended journal articles. An independent t -test was not significant between female and male participants. However, a Pearson product-moment correlation to assess the relationship between the various factors about RBI use found positive associations between organizational factors and expertise and between awareness factors and expertise to use RBI. Education must promote increased adoption of RBI in professional practice to enhance educational quality for all students. This can be accomplished by building ongoing solid school-university partnerships to develop context-specific frameworks that support inclusive teachers to conduct and use more research in their practice.

Keywords: Bourdieu; Ghana; inclusive education; research evidence; basic school teachers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440231216575 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:13:y:2023:i:4:p:21582440231216575

DOI: 10.1177/21582440231216575

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in SAGE Open
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().