The stakes extend beyond one country. Learner autonomy, broadly defined as taking responsibility for one’s own learning, has been associated in decades of research with stronger engagement, higher motivation, and better retention of language knowledge. In English as a Foreign Language settings, where students rarely encounter English outside the classroom, autonomy is increasingly viewed as necessary rather than optional. Ethiopia’s 2021 General Education Curriculum Framework explicitly states that students should become self-directed learners who can plan, monitor, and evaluate their own learning, and the national EFL syllabus for grades 9 through 12 lists developing autonomous learning skills as a cross-cutting competency. Yet previous studies have consistently described Ethiopian EFL classrooms as teacher-dominated, and no large-scale mixed-methods study had ever measured the link between teachers’ observed autonomy-supportive behaviors and students’ actual autonomous actions.

The research team, led by Esayas Teshome Taddese of INTI International University in Malaysia, together with colleagues at Wolkite University in Ethiopia and Ajman University in the United Arab Emirates, used an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design with quantitative priority. From four of the eight districts in Gurage Zone, they randomly selected two government secondary schools each, then recruited 34 of 36 eligible EFL teachers and 412 Grade 12 students selected systematically from class lists. Each teacher was observed during four 40-minute lessons using a 30-item schedule called the Teacher Autonomy-Supportive Practices Observation Schedule, or TAPOS, adapted from an established protocol and contextualized for Ethiopian classrooms. The tool rated five dimensions of autonomy support on five-point frequency scales: providing choices, providing rationales, acknowledging negative feelings, avoiding controlling language, and encouraging self-initiation.

Students completed two further instruments in a single 50-minute session. The Student Perception of Autonomy Support Scale, a 24-item questionnaire adapted from the Learning Climate Questionnaire and translated into Amharic through back-translation, measured how students interpreted their teacher’s behavior, with two distractor items about general teaching quality excluded from analysis. The Learner Autonomy Inventory, a 40-item scale with subscales for goal-setting and planning, self-monitoring, strategy use, and resource-seeking, captured students’ self-reported autonomous behaviors. Both instruments showed good internal consistency in pilot testing. Because students were nested within teachers, the researchers treated teacher-level and student-level variables separately throughout, a distinction they maintain carefully: observed autonomy-supportive practices, measured by TAPOS at the teacher level, are conceptually distinct from perceived autonomy support, measured by SPASS at the student level.

The observational results were stark. Across 136 lessons, the mean TAPOS score was just 2.1 out of 5. The most common dimension was providing rationales, observed in 68 percent of lessons, but even that fell below the scale midpoint, and when rationales appeared they were typically generic, framed around exam preparation rather than genuine usefulness. Providing choices occurred in only 39 percent of lessons, most often as a choice between two homework exercises. Acknowledging negative feelings appeared in just 12 percent of lessons. Avoiding controlling language was rare in the opposite sense: teachers used phrases like you must finish by tomorrow in 74 percent of lessons. Most striking of all, encouraging self-initiation, in which teachers invite students to suggest topics, pose questions, or make decisions about their learning, occurred in only 4 percent of lessons. Teachers with master’s degrees scored slightly higher than those with bachelor’s degrees, but urban and rural schools showed no significant differences.

Student data mirrored the classroom picture. The mean SPASS score for the 22 autonomy-specific items was 2.7 out of 5, closely tracking the observed practices and suggesting that students’ perceptions largely reflect what teachers actually do. The lowest-rated statements concerned asking for student opinions about what to learn and allowing students to choose their own homework. Self-reported learner autonomy on the LAI averaged 2.4 out of 4, with goal-setting the weakest subscale: the least popular autonomous activity was setting weekly English goals, and only 12 percent of students said they read English texts outside class often or always. Interestingly, female students reported significantly higher autonomous behaviors than males, a difference consistent with findings from Korea and Spain, though the authors caution that some self-monitoring items may reflect compliance with school expectations rather than genuine autonomy.

The statistical core of the study lies in its multilevel modeling. An unconditional two-level model showed that approximately 17.5 percent of the variance in learner autonomy was attributable to differences between teacher clusters, justifying the hierarchical approach. In the full two-level linear mixed-effects model, perceived autonomy support was positively associated with learner autonomy, as was prior English achievement, while teacher-level TAPOS scores were also positively associated with learner autonomy after accounting for perceptions. Class size showed a negative association, indicating that larger classes constrain opportunities for individualized autonomy support. Teacher experience, initially included, was dropped from the final model because it was not significant and correlated substantially with teacher education level.

The mediation analysis provided the study’s most theoretically interesting result. Using a 2-1-1 multilevel mediation framework, in which the teacher-level TAPOS score served as the predictor, student perceptions as the mediator, and learner autonomy as the outcome, the researchers estimated a significant indirect effect of 0.087 with a 95 percent Monte Carlo confidence interval that excluded zero. Roughly 23 percent of the total association between teacher practices and learner autonomy operated through students’ perceptions of autonomy support. This pathway is consistent with Self-Determination Theory, which holds that autonomy-supportive teaching fosters intrinsic motivation and self-regulation by satisfying basic psychological needs. But the authors are careful to note that the cross-sectional design cannot establish temporal ordering or causation, and the small number of teacher-level units limits precision.

The qualitative phase added crucial nuance. Students expressed ambivalence: one high-autonomy student wished her teacher would let her choose essay topics, saying she was tired of always writing about My Village, while a low-autonomy student admitted that if asked what he wanted to learn, he would not know, because all he knew was what was in the textbook. Teachers, meanwhile, overwhelmingly invoked culture, with 30 of 34 suggesting that autonomy conflicts with Ethiopian norms in which the teacher decides like a parent. One teacher described a failed attempt at student choice that ended in twenty minutes of unresolved argument. Yet four teachers reported success with gradual, structured strategies, such as offering small binary options before expanding student decision-making, or using weekly self-assessment checklists that prompted students to honestly identify what they did not understand. Both teachers and students identified the national examination, with its 100 multiple-choice questions, as the primary structural barrier, rendering student opinion irrelevant to assessment.

The study’s implications are layered. Theoretically, it offers preliminary evidence that Self-Determination Theory’s mechanisms operate in a non-Western, resource-poor setting, and that autonomy can take culturally congruent forms through structured rather than open-ended choices, consistent with the Culturally Appropriate Autonomy Model. Practically, the authors recommend that teachers begin with structured options, provide explicit and meaningful rationales, and introduce simple self-assessment routines. They call for teacher education programs to include modules on fostering learner autonomy, noting that none of the six programs in Gurage Zone currently does. At the policy level, they suggest that even modest changes to national examinations, such as items requiring essay planning or self-evaluation, could signal the value of autonomy within the assessment system. The findings echo patterns documented in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, where exam-driven curricula similarly suppress learner independence. What emerges is neither a story of cultural impossibility nor a simple prescription, but evidence that the autonomy gap in Ethiopian classrooms is real, measurable, and potentially closable through gradual, structured approaches that respect both cultural context and systemic constraints.

Subject of Research: Learner autonomy and autonomy-supportive teaching in Ethiopian secondary EFL classrooms

Article Title: Learner autonomy in Ethiopian secondary EFL classrooms: observed teacher practices and student perceptions

Article References: Taddese, E. T., Yassin, H. A., Dinsa, M. T., & Shorouk, A. (2026). Learner autonomy in Ethiopian secondary EFL classrooms: observed teacher practices and student perceptions. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1940198. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1940198

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1940198

Keywords: learner autonomy, EFL, Ethiopia, autonomy-supportive teaching, Self-Determination Theory, multilevel modeling, mediation analysis, classroom observation, teacher education, assessment policy, secondary education, mixed methods

The review, conducted by Arianna Marci of the University of Genoa and Martina Ragusa and Flavio Manganello of Italy’s National Research Council, followed the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews and searched Scopus and Web of Science for studies published between 2005 and 2025. From 491 deduplicated records, 69 sources met the inclusion criteria: empirical or theoretical work reporting a change in the teaching practices of university teachers following structured faculty development, in any discipline other than medical, dental, nursing, veterinary, or pharmacy education. The authors deliberately excluded health professions education because that field, with its accreditation mandates and routine clinical observation of teaching, has already been synthesized twice and operates under conditions most of higher education does not share. Setting it aside allowed the rest of the field to be described on its own terms for the first time since 2008.

The reviewers charted 498 reported effects across the included sources, organized using the four-level adaptation of Kirkpatrick’s model developed by Stes and colleagues for faculty development in higher education. Level 3, teacher behaviour, is the level most directly tied to what development programs promise: the transfer of learning into actual classroom practice. Of the 498 effects, 217 sat at this behavioural level. And here the review’s central finding emerges. Of those 217 behavioural effects, 150 rested on teacher self-report, either narrative accounts or responses to questionnaires, while only 66 rested on evidence external to the teacher, such as peer or expert observation, student perceptions, or analysis of course artefacts. One effect could not be classified at all.

The direction of effect depended dramatically on who supplied the evidence. Positive effects accounted for 65 percent of self-reported behavioural changes but only 42 percent of externally documented ones, with a quarter of the externally documented effects reporting no change whatsoever. The same asymmetry appeared for measurement design: 65 percent of effects measured without a pre-intervention baseline were positive, against 49 percent of those measured with one. When the two factors were combined, the most demanding configuration, external evidence measured against a baseline, was the only one in which no change was the modal outcome, reported for 14 of its 24 effects. In other words, the predominance of positive findings in this literature is partly an artefact of the methods that produced them.

The methodological weaknesses run deep. Of the 64 empirical studies appraised with the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool, 29 used non-randomised or purely descriptive quantitative designs, and only a single study employed random assignment. Forty-seven of the 69 sources had no comparison group of any kind. Quantitative and mixed methods studies recurrently showed incomplete outcome data, unaccounted confounding, and undocumented intervention fidelity; in 13 of 23 appraised non-randomised studies, attendance or completion data were absent, leaving the exposure whose effect was being estimated entirely unverified. Only two of those 23 reported complete outcome data. The qualitative work, by contrast, largely met its methodological criteria, though its recurrent weakness was asserting changes in classroom practice on the basis of participants’ self-reports alone.

Perhaps the most striking finding concerns evaluation frameworks. Fifty-three of the 69 sources, more than three quarters, named no evaluation model at all. They described an intervention, chose instruments, and reported results without locating the exercise in any framework. The 16 that did name one did not converge: Kirkpatrick appeared in four, Rogers’ diffusion of innovations and the Community of Inquiry framework in two each, and eight further frameworks in a single source apiece. Notably, the Stes framework designed specifically for faculty development in higher education was used as an evaluation scheme by no source other than the Antwerp papers by its own authors. The field’s apparent theoretical pluralism, the authors observe, rests partly on a category difference that passes unremarked, since outcome taxonomies, theories of individual change, and intervention characterisations are not models of the same thing.

The instrumentation tells a similar story of fragmentation. Only 75 of the 217 behavioural effects rested on a published instrument. The Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol supported 30 of them, more than any other, followed by the Approaches to Teaching Inventory with 15. But 87 behavioural effects rested on instruments the study authors devised themselves, and 55 on no instrument at all. Two thirds of the evidence on what teachers do therefore rests on measures that exist only in the study that used them and cannot be compared across the corpus. The field’s instrumentation is bimodal: a small observational tradition anchored on RTOP and COPUS, and a large body of study-specific self-report measures.

Two sources in the corpus demonstrate the divergence between self-report and observation internally. Ross and colleagues found that the Approaches to Teaching Inventory and the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol were uncorrelated in the same teachers, with no observed change in RTOP scores while both ATI scales rose significantly. Stes and colleagues found no change in teaching behaviour as perceived by students in the very programme for which an earlier paper had reported an effect on teaching approach. These are not marginal anomalies. They suggest that the field’s principal self-report instrument and its principal observation protocol may not be measuring the same object, and that the choice between them is not a matter of convenience.

The evidence base is also strikingly concentrated. Thirty-six of the 69 sources report on the United States, and 34 of the 39 sources that identify a disciplinary context are in engineering or other STEM fields, chiefly biology. The median study involved just 36 teachers, and 41 of the 69 sources were published between 2020 and 2025, making this a young and geographically narrow literature. What is known about faculty development’s impact on teaching practices, the authors conclude, is largely what is known about STEM teaching in North American universities. Whether the findings transfer to other disciplines and other systems remains an open question the corpus cannot answer.

The authors are careful about what their findings do and do not imply. None of this, they write, means that faculty development fails to change teaching practice. It means the literature, as presently constituted, is not in a position to establish that it does. The remedies they propose are modest and mostly consist of reporting what programs already know about themselves: naming the instruments used, recording attendance and completion, reporting attrition, and collecting a baseline of some kind, however crude. External observation of a sample of teaching, they argue, is not a refinement reserved for research but the only evidence that speaks directly to what teachers actually do, and the RTOP and COPUS tradition demonstrates that it can be organised at the scale of hundreds of sessions. For institutions that fund faculty development, the message is pointed: an evaluation specified as end-of-program participant feedback buys a result it cannot use, because the modal study of that design returns a positive finding almost irrespective of what occurred in the classroom.

Subject of Research: The impact of faculty development programs on teaching practices in higher education, assessed through a scoping review of evaluation methods and evidence quality.

Article Title: Impact of faculty development on teaching practices in higher education: a scoping review

Article References: Marci, A., Ragusa, M., & Manganello, F. (2026). Impact of faculty development on teaching practices in higher education: a scoping review. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1947549. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1947549

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1947549

Keywords: faculty development, higher education, teaching practices, scoping review, Kirkpatrick model, self-report bias, STEM education, classroom observation, RTOP, evaluation methods, teacher behaviour, research methodology

The motivation for the work stems from a persistent gap in education systems worldwide. Governments and educational administrations increasingly call for the identification and dissemination of good practices with digital technologies in order to improve teaching quality, and international repositories such as the European School Education Platform and the UNESCO ICT in Education Repository collect and share such experiences. Yet defining what actually counts as a good practice has remained surprisingly elusive. Previous literature reviews have highlighted criteria such as effectiveness, transformative effect, sustainability, legitimacy and replicability, while regional agencies in Spain have emphasized features including curriculum integration, institutional support, improved outcomes, interdisciplinarity, inclusion and the involvement of the educational community. Without clear, observable criteria, judgments about quality risk being subjective and inconsistent.

To anchor the instrument in a coherent theoretical framework, the research team, based at the Department of Pedagogy of Universitat Rovira i Virgili, turned to Activity Theory, a cultural-historical framework originally developed by Vygotsky, Leontiev and Engestrom. Activity Theory conceives educational practice as an intentional, object-oriented action involving students and teachers working toward a common goal, mediated by physical and sociocultural tools. The theory models an activity system through its core components, including the subject, tools, community, rules, division of labor and object, and it emphasizes the dynamic, dialectical interactions among these elements. This holistic view aligns closely with the structure of a learning situation and allows observers to detect tensions, contradictions and disruptions within the classroom activity system, which the researchers see as essential to understanding how digital technologies are actually integrated into teaching and learning.

The study adopted a Design-Based Research approach, a methodology structured around iterative cycles of analysis, design, development and evaluation. The first cycle began with a systematic literature review following the PRISMA 2020 model, searching databases including Web of Science, Scopus, ERIC, SciELO and Dialnet for publications from 2013 to 2023 describing educational practices with digital technologies at any educational level. From an initial pool of 718 publications, 27 studies were selected for full content analysis using ATLAS.ti software. This analysis identified 26 variables linked to the seven components of Activity Theory, each operationally defined with its theoretical meaning, the type of evidence required for observation and its intended use within the guideline, forming the initial prototype of the instrument.

Validation proceeded through the Delphi method, a structured technique for aggregating expert judgment over successive rounds. The team formed a coordinating group and recruited a panel of experts across four professional profiles: teachers from early childhood, primary and secondary education; university professors; researchers; and professionals involved in educational management. Thirty-two experts were invited and 26 completed the competence questionnaire, which calculated an Expert Competence Index combining self-assessed knowledge and the quality of argumentation sources. Twenty-three experts scored at or above the 0.8 threshold denoting high competence and continued into the Delphi rounds, a panel size consistent with established guidance that Delphi studies typically require between 15 and 35 participants.

The three Delphi rounds progressively sharpened the instrument. In the first round, 23 experts ranked the variables derived from each Activity Theory component, and the researchers computed a Relative Importance Index to convert the rankings into interpretable percentages, selecting the two highest-priority variables per component to yield 14 variables and 14 indicators. In the second round, 20 experts rated the clarity and relevance of the proposed indicators, with most indicators exceeding 85 percent positive validation and five achieving unanimous acceptance; all indicators met the Content Validity Index threshold of at least 78 percent, the criterion the team used to classify indicators as excellent. In the third round, nine experts assessed their satisfaction with the revised indicators, and mean scores rose while standard deviations fell, with two indicators reaching a perfect average of 4.00 with zero variability, confirming that the iterative refinements had addressed the panel’s concerns.

With the validated prototype in hand, the team moved to pilot testing in authentic educational settings, an essential step for establishing external validity and feasibility. The pilot involved eight educational practices distributed across four stages, early childhood, primary, secondary and higher education, with two practices per stage, all hosted by different public institutions that had previously collaborated with the university. Sessions lasted one hour in the school stages and two hours at university, with class sizes ranging from 28 students in early childhood settings to as many as 80 university students. Researchers observed each practice simultaneously using individual copies of the guideline and then jointly interviewed the observed teachers with a complementary 13-question semi-structured interview guide, allowing triangulation of the observational data.

Reliability analyses during the pilot demonstrated that different observers could apply the instrument consistently. Weighted Cohen’s Kappa values ranged from 0.64 to 1.00 across the 14 indicators, with 10 of the 14 indicators exceeding 0.80, indicating substantial to almost perfect agreement according to commonly accepted interpretive benchmarks. Intraclass Correlation Coefficients, calculated under the two-way random-effects absolute-agreement model, ranged from 0.67 to 1.00 for single measures, while the global ICC reached 0.89 for single measures and 0.94 for average measures. These figures confirm that the guideline is robust, internally coherent and replicable across observers and contexts, a critical property for any instrument intended to support fair evaluation of teaching quality.

The pilot also generated concrete improvements to the instrument’s design and usability. The researchers added a new section capturing contextual information such as the observed teacher’s name, type of session, school type and dimensions, and technological devices used, reoriented the layout from horizontal to vertical for easier field use, reorganized indicators so that all indicators for each component appeared on the same page, expanded the open-observation field from three to seven lines, and moved illustrative examples directly into the guideline itself. One indicator was reworded to replace a conjunction with a disjunctive form, broadening its scope to capture situations in which community resources or external agents are identified but not necessarily used. Post-pilot analysis showed that 58 percent of the modifications involved new sections, 32 percent design adjustments and 10 percent content changes.

Beyond its immediate technical achievement, the instrument carries significant practical potential. The authors note that teacher training has traditionally emphasized technical mastery of digital tools rather than their pedagogical integration, and the observation guideline is well positioned to serve as a formative assessment tool, a self-reflection resource in mentoring programs, or an evidence-based component in departmental evaluations of technology-enhanced teaching. Its flexible design allows adaptation to different disciplines, educational levels and modalities, including hybrid and virtual environments. The authors caution that further research is needed, including criterial and convergent validation, sensitivity testing to detect changes in teaching practice over time, assessment of transferability across educational systems, and development of an English-language version, but the validated guideline already represents a substantial step toward making the evaluation of good digital teaching practices systematic, transparent and grounded in direct evidence from real classrooms.

Subject of Research: Design and validation of an Activity Theory-based observation instrument for identifying good educational practices with digital technologies through direct classroom observation

Article Title: Good educational practices with digital technologies: validation of an instrument for direct classroom observations

Article References: López-Vilar, R., Queralt-Romero, M., Molero-Aranda, T., & Cantabrana, J. L. L. (2026). Good educational practices with digital technologies: validation of an instrument for direct classroom observations. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00065-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00065-0

Keywords: digital technologies, educational practices, classroom observation, Activity Theory, Delphi method, instrument validation, teacher digital competence, Design-Based Research, educational research, inter-rater reliability, content validity, teaching and learning