Pedagogy?

In educational literature there are many definitions of the term pedagogy. Different people have defined it differently, depending upon their knowledge and perceptions of the term. But the most common and prevalent definition of pedagogy, found today, is that” It is the art or science of teaching or teaching methods. Pedagogy is generally concerned with the elementary and early childhood education.  

In fact pedagogy is made of two separate Greek words “Paidos” which means a boy or a child and “agogos” which means a leader. So the term pedagogy means leading the child.  Putting it more simply, it includes all those skills and tools which are used by a teacher or an educator while leading their pupils towards the goals and aims of education which are set by the society, a nation or a country for its children and defined in the national curriculum. But these objectives cannot be fully achieved unless our teacher is not well-versed and thoroughly equipped with the necessary skills and techniques to inculcate this curriculum in the body and souls of their students. All these skills and techniques can be found in Pedagogy.

Pedagogy is a science which gives us information about the instructional strategies and learning theories. Pedagogy tells how to create an affective learning environment in the classroom. It tells us how to motivate our students and get them ready for learning. It tells us which instructional strategy is better for which discipline of education. It informs us about the nature and different learning styles of our students. Pedagogy helps us in knowing various needs of a child during different stages of its personality. I hope you would have understood now that pedagogy is directly related with the teachers’ education and training. In short, pedagogy is generally concerned with the following topics.

1. Instructional Strategies.
2. Learning Theories.
3. Learning Styles.
4. Educational Assessment and Evaluation
5. Classroom Management.

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Types Of Nonprobabilty Sampling

Nonprobability sampling has no element of chance and likelihood. It means that the selection of elements from the population of interest is not random, but according to our discretion and purpose, in this type of sampling. Though nonprobability sampling is more economical and easier than probability sampling but its use is still very limited in the field of research and most research prefer to use probability sampling in their research. The main reason of its less popularity is that we can’t estimate the confidence interval when sampling in this way. In other words, we can’t say how confident we would be about the result of our study or how much our sample would be a true representative of the population of interest if we adopt this method of sampling. But it doesn’t mean that we should not use it at all. Sometimes it is not convenient or practically possible for us to conduct probability sampling for our research, therefore we use nonprobability sampling. Following are some of the well known types of nonprobability sampling.

1. Convenience Sampling:

In convenience sampling we select only the most conveniently available elements of the population of interest e.g. friends, relatives, colleagues, shoppers on the mall, school-mates etc. Typical kinds of convenience sampling include:

i. Persons On The Street Sample

ii. Shopping Mall Intercept Sample

iii. Intact Group Sample

iv. Fortuitous Sample

2.  Purposive Sampling:

In this kind of sampling we select only those elements from the population which best suit the purpose of our study.

3. Judgmental Sampling:

A judgment sample is obtained when we select elements from the population based upon our own judgment or according to the recommendation of someone else that is well familiar with the relevant characteristics of population.

4. Referral or Snowball Sampling:

In this kind of sampling we don’t have a prior knowledge of the elements of population; therefore we take help from the first element we select for the sample. Put simply if we want to conduct a study about the relationship between a certain drug and its impact on our health. It may be possible that we don’t know about the users of that drug. But if we find the first user he can tell us about the 2nd user and so on.

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