A study of Thai public and private secondary schools employing nine categories of instructional strategies

This research project describes the study about Dimensions of Learning (DoL) conducted in Thailand that recommends changes in Thai secondary schools. This research project is a comparative research study which investigates three private secondary schools and three public secondary schools in the Bangkok Metropolitan Area. The aim of this research project is to shift Thai secondary education from rote learning for university entrance towards the fulfilment of life-long learning. This research project is based on DoL and Nine Categories of Instructional Strategies developed by Marzano and a team of researchers. Indeed, the Nine Categories of Instructional Strategies were employed as a tool for creating the observation scale and interview questions used in the research project. The research sample consisted of thirty school teachers, six academic teachers, and six school principals from the selected six secondary schools. Then, altogether the sample size is forty-two. The results concluded that there was a statistically significant difference between the observations and the interviews of the private secondary schools at significance level 0.01. Simultaneously, there was a statistically significant difference between the observations and the interviews of the public secondary schools at significance level 0.01. Also, it can be concluded that the Nine Categories of Instructional Strategies occurred at low levels in the public secondary schools. On the other hand, nine activities occurred at high levels across the private secondary schools. The product of this research project is a Policy Handbook (see Appendix 1) which the Thai Ministry of Education should consider in order to focus on successfully implementing DoL in Thai secondary education as a framework for learning design.