Teacher's Professional Competencies in Knowledge of Subject Matter at Secondary Level in Southern Districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

This study was conducted with the aim to know the professional competency of subject matter of secondary school teachers, working in various districts so that recommendation may be given according to the training needs of the secondary school teachers. The population of the study comprised all the secondary school teachers working in secondary schools in eight districts of the Southern region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. A sample of 700 teachers was selected out of 2147 secondary school teachers using a simple random sampling method. The theoretical framework of the study has been taken from the ten National Professional Standards for Teachers in Pakistan, published in February 2009 by Policy and Planning Wing, Ministry of Education, Government of Pakistan. A questionnaire was developed of five statements on five point Likert Scale. The collected data was entered in SPSS 16 and the results were generated according to the objectives of the study using mean, standard deviation, Analysis of Variance, and Sheffe Post hoc test, as statistical tests. It was concluded that the secondary school teachers working in various districts of the southern region of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan possessed sufficient knowledge of their subject matter. However, their weakest area is to make the subject matter applicable to the real world situation. Competency in the knowledge of the subject matter of the teachers who were working in the district Hangu is significantly weak as compared to the teachers working in the district Bannu, D.I.Khan, and Peshawar.