ABSTRACT
The discussion of the act of teaching and the attendant discourse of pedagogy in Chapters 5 and 6 explored several pedagogical elements in the conceptual framework: culture, community and history in the culture/society realm; school, curriculum and assessment in the system/policy realm; and teachers, teaching and students in the classroom realm. This chapter turns to one remaining pedagogical dimension, learning in the classroom stratum. In spite of the rationale of the implementation of learner-centred pedagogy (LCP) that it will bring about better learning, links between LCP and pupil performance in the global South have been arguable. Only scant literature explicitly has examined such associations and has not found consistent results in terms of the effectiveness of LCP in relation to pupil learning. To facilitate empirical understanding as to whether LCP may translate into better learning, the present study examined the associations between observed-LCP, perceived-LCP and learning outcomes. The outcome measurement included pupils’ academic performance and attitudes towards learning. Although the study did not intend to deduce any causal relationship given the small number of classes observed, the analysis sought to draw an implication for associations between different variables from the individual-level data of the 1,024 pupils, and to relate them to the analytical framework underpinning this study.
