An Empirical Study on Integrated Teacher Education and Bachelor of Education Programmes in Southern India

An empirical study is made comparing two teacher training programmes, Integrated Teacher Education programme and Bachelor of Education programme. In the survey, a comparison between three domains content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge of the pre-service teachers who are undergoing the two different curricula at different institutes have been carried out. Using bivariate analysis of variance for the three domains, we found that students of the integrated curriculum showed higher levels of professional preparation and competency in content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge domains than those pursuing Bachelor of Education curriculum. However, students of both programmes demonstrated almost similar performance in pedagogical content knowledge. This finding emphasizes the importance of enhancing pedagogical content knowledge and thereby reciprocates the need for strengthening the teacher training programmes.