Lecturers’ Pedagogical Practices in Higher Education: Determining the Counter-Balance Between Higher and Lower Order Thinking Skills

It appears that higher education students, particularly those in Sub-Saharan Africa, are unable to demonstrate critical thinking skills, leading to their non-employability after school. This problem seems to be partly associated with pedagogical practices in higher education; and so, several studies have been conducted to investigate lecturers’ pedagogical practices in higher education. However, it appears that most of these studies have focused solely on exploring the nature of lecturers’ practices. Hence, the present study departs from previous studies by quantifying lecturers’ practices to determine their level of concentration on lower-order and higher-order thinking skills. The study focuses on three disciplinary fields such as English, Religion, and History by utilizing the case study design. While two iterated observations are done for each discipline in a semester, 120 documents, including 60 course outlines (20 from each discipline) and 60 examinations past questions (20 from each discipline), are selected. Frequencies and percentages, represented by pie charts, bar charts, and a log-likelihood calculator, are used to present the study's results. Findings from the study show that collectively, lecturers have developed epistemic predisposition to adopt practices that focus more on higher-order thinking skills such as creativity, criticality, collaboration, and communication. However, the tendency to focus more on higher-order thinking skills does not materialise in their instructional discourse and assessment practices, especially History lecturers. It is, thus, recommended that lecturers (especially History lecturers) should adopt pragmatic and innovative measures in utilizing practices that foster higher-order thinking skills in their discourse-related and assessment practices for the realisation of transformative education. Also, the Government of Ghana, in collaboration with Management in higher education, should provide adequate resources such as infrastructure and digital technologies for effective teaching and learning in higher education in the African Sub-region.