Attitudes of Nigerian secondary school teachers to student evaluation of teachers

Abstract

This study was designed to assess the attitudes of Nigerian secondary school teachers to student evaluation of teachers (SET), and to find out if the attitudes expressed were influenced by teacher characteristics such as gender, professional status, geographical location, academic qualification and teaching experience. The study was a survey, and made use of a researcher-designed questionnaire as research instrument. Teachers in one state in Nigeria were sampled, as similar conditions apply for teachers in all states in Nigeria. A stratified random technique was used to select 480 teachers from 20 schools. Four hypotheses were tested using t-test and four-way ANOVA. The findings were that: (i) Nigerian teachers expressed significantly negative attitudes to SET when the results of such evaluation were to serve both formative and summative purposes, although the attitudes were more negative when the purpose was summative; and (ii) the attitudes expressed by Nigerian teachers to SET were not significantly influenced by the gender, academic qualification and teaching experience of the teachers under the two forms of purposes. However, under both purposes, teachers in urban areas were found to express relatively more negative attitudes to SET than their counterparts in rural areas. It was concluded that Nigerian teachers are not too different from their counterparts abroad in treating SET with serious caution. It was recommended that Nigerian school policy makers and administrators should exercise great care in the use of student ratings of teachers, especially in personnel decisions.