This research report is about the impact of university teachers' pedagogical skills training on approaches to teaching measured by teaching components in ASTU. Descriptive survey research design was employed. The participants were 111 teachers attended Pedagogical Skills Improvement on seven modules for 106hrs in the year 2009-2013.Stratified sampling techniques were employed to select participants. The teachers were from six schools that were divided into five groups depending on the amount of pedagogical training they had. The instrument of data collection was questionnaire and checklists. Mixed research approach was employed to analyses of the data. The results indicated that pedagogical skills training had an effect on their teaching skills in using lesson planning, active learning, and continuous assessment and classroom management. The teachers mentioned not only positive effects of pedagogical training on their teaching but also informed some difficulties like redundancy of concepts, activities, examples; modules are not to the standard, long duration of the training and large class size, lack of material and facilities, lack of motivation, inability to implement fully what they have acquired from the training.

The aim of school autonomy is to improve the education quality by independence and flexibility in managing existing resources. Regardless of this trend, amazingly little is known about how schools use autonomy in practice, and there were many controversies regarding the relationship between school autonomy and students' academic achievement. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the magnitude of relationship between the areas of school autonomy and students' academic achievement in the secondary schools in the study area. The study employed adescriptive-correlational survey research design with a mixed methods approach. A total of 522 respondents (secondary school principals n=20, teachers n=347, and zone and district education office experts n=155) were used as samples. The sample schools were selected by stratified random sampling and the respondents were selected by simple random sampling using RAND or RANDBETWEEN function on Microsoft Excel. Closed-ended questionnaires were employed for gathering quantitative data from the respondents, and concurrently telephone interview and document analysiswere conducted to collect the qualitative data. The Pearson correlation and multiple regression statistical tests were used to measure and describe the significance of the association (or relationship) between the variables or sets of scores. Moreover, t-test was also conducted to test the difference between the teachers and experts. Analysis of the results demonstrated that majority of the respondents perceived school autonomy positively. Moreover, even though the flow of improvement was not constant, it seems that there were few improvements in students' academic achievement as a result of the practices of school autonomy. The findings also show that there were a number of constraining factors of school autonomy in the study area. The overall conclusion drawn from the results of this study was that: granting autonomy to secondary schools may be the best idea for the better performance of educational systems in the study area along with removing the constraining factors such as lack of training, knowledge, directives/guidelines and school facilities, and financial corruption. Furthermore, similar to many of the developed countries, practice of school autonomy in developing countries was also one of the means to improve students' academic achievement. Therefore, it can be recommended that the national, regional and district education authorities and researchers have to focus on implementation of the school autonomy along with building the capacity of the school leaders.

The aim of this study is to investigate the rationale for the seasonality of mobility, division of labor and organizations, and the availability of educational services in their routes and mobility corridors. It further looks for the convenience of the education service delivery to the mobile way of life and pastoralist livelihoods of Afar pastoralists and its implications for the need to have mobility mapping for effective delivery so as achieve educational equity. Hence, it follows a qualitative exploratory design so as to investigate the existing facts on the mobility of pastoralists' Afars. The qualitative data was gathered from purposively selected clan leaders. The data were categorized thematically and analysed qualitatively. The findings revealed that Afar pastoralists' mobility is rational, systematic, and well organized through their traditional social structure with a clear division of labor. Moreover, the education service delivery modalities are not fit in to the mobile way of life in which they are not following their mobility pattern, route, and corridors. This gives the insight to have a mobility mapping for clearer information of their mobility and school mapping so as to deliver proper education and achieve educational equity.

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