In post-secondary education, no formal pedagogical education of teachers has generally been required. However, there are many institutions which have introduced evaluation of instruction and offered staff development programs for their teachers.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the claim that pedagogical education of teachers results in improvements of pedagogical skills and consequently the students learning outcomes also improve. Five selected pedagogical skills of two matched groups of ten teachers at the Faculty of Engineering at the Rivers State University of Science and Technology in Nigeria were compared in "pre" and "post treatment" state. The experimental group of teachers were exposed to special treatment while the control group was not. Specific evaluation methods were used such as interview, questionnaires and observations of teacher-students interaction during classes. Two different approaches of testing procedures were used. First, an inferential statistic employing an non-parametric Wilcoxon Matched-Pairs Signed Rank Test. Second, a descriptive statistic to tabulate and describe the differences and to present the results graphically.
The one-tailed Wilcoxon Matched-Pairs Signed Rank Tests conducted at a 0.01 level of significance showed, that a significant difference occurred in the skills of teachers in the experimental group which received pedagogical education. Virtually no changes were observed in the skills of the control group teachers. The descriptive statistical tests confirmed the inferential test results.
This study demonstrated that two matched groups of teachers which were drawn from the same population showed significant differences in pedagogical skills after one of them, the experimental group was exposed to specific treatment.
