Towards Improved Teaching Effectiveness in Nigerian Public Universities: Instrument Design and Validation

Abstract

This research is conducted to examine what is currently evaluated with respect to teaching in Nigerian publicuniversities and to produce instruments that would be useful for examining the course and teaching effectiveness ofcourse lecturers. Telephone interview of ten (10) professors in ten public Nigerian Universities is used to elicitinformation on the current state of evaluation of teaching while a document analysis reveals the concerns ofNational Universities Commission with lecturers during programme accreditation. Finding indicates that teachingeffectiveness is grossly ignored in the lecturer appraisal process. An 18 item questionnaire and another 15 itemquestionnaire measuring teaching and course effectiveness respectively is constructed. After a test retest procedureusing four lecturers and four courses, the instruments yielded a reliability coefficient ranging from -0.568 to 0.591for lecturers and 0.548 to 0.944 for the courses. The correlation coefficient values clearly reveal that the courseevaluation and lecturers’ evaluation forms were adequate to generate information on the course and lecturereffectiveness. It is therefore recommended, among other things that the National Universities Commission (NUC) asa regulatory body should make the evaluation of teaching a mandatory policy for all universities.