The relationship between pre-service teachers’ WASSCE results and their academic performance at the Presbyterian College of Education

Abstract

In line with international best practices, countries across the globe are intensifying their teacher education institutions in order to train world class teachers to feed their schools. It is against this background that this research work tried to find out how robust the admission process at the Presbyterian College of Education, Akropong is. This is because admitting students into the College of Education is the first step in ensuring a sound teacher training program. The correlational design was used for the study and the purposive sampling technique was employed to select the standardized tests scores of 2,097 students’ WASSCE entry results against their Final GPA at the College of Education for the data analysis using SPSS 22.0 version. The results of the analysis proved that those who entered into the College of Education with good grades from the Senior High School exited with good GPAs and the inverse was true. Also on the issue of gender difference in terms of performance, it was revealed that males entered with slightly better results than their female counterparts and the final GPA were in the same manner. Again the average entry grades and the graduating CGPA for the four years were significantly different. However where the gender parity ratio was low, the differences in the male and female CGPA was minimal The researcher therefore recommends that the college must move beyond the normal training and put in measures to ensure that most of the students are able to improve on their performance to be at par with the current demands of a world class teacher. More importantly there should be enough gender sensitive and female- friendly measures to ensure that the gender parity ratio is reduced further so that the females can catch up with the males in terms of academic achievement.