Teachers’ Characteristics as Correlates of Students’ Academic Performance among Secondary School Students in Saki-west Local Government Area of Oyo State

Abstract

This study examined relationship among teachers academic qualification, teachers professional qualification, teachers content knowledge, teachers instructional quality, teachers’ evaluation procedures, teachers’ work value, teachers’ classroom attendance’ and teachers’ job satisfaction on academic performance of secondary school students in Saki-west local government area. The study adopted a descriptive research design of correlational type. The secondary school teachers in Saki township were selected using multi-stage sampling technique and 718 teachers were selected at random for the study out of 2456 teachers working in this local government. The Teacher’s characteristics scale (? = 0.86) was used as a measure of teacher’s characteristics factor. Three research questions were answered in the study. Correlation and Multiple Regression were used as tools of analysis. The eight variables (teachers academic qualification, teachers professional qualification, teachers content knowledge, teachers instructional quality, teachers’ evaluation procedures, teachers’ work value, teachers’ classroom attendance’ and teachers’ job satisfaction) when combined, accounted for 54.6% of the total variance in the academic performance. There was also significant relative contribution of the independent variables (teachers academic qualification, teachers content knowledge, teachers instructional quality, teachers’ evaluation procedures and teachers’ job satisfaction) to academic performance of the participants (F(8,710)=47.48; p < 0.05). Also, the teachers content knowledge made the most significant relative contribution to the prediction of academic performance(B=0.544, t=7.692, p<0.05); followed by teachers instructional quality (B=0.531, t=12.767, p<0.05); teachers academic qualification (B=0.445, t=5.696, p<0.05), followed by teachers evaluation procedures (B=0.405, t=3.924, p<0.05) and then, teachers job satisfaction (B= 0.176, t=2.369, p<0.05). However, teachers’ professional qualification, teachers work value and teachers classroom attendance were not potent predictors of academic performance of secondary school students in the surveyed local government area. The eight independent variables (teachers academic qualification, teachers professional qualification, teachers content knowledge, teachers instructional quality, teachers’ evaluation procedures, teachers’ work value, teachers’ classroom attendance’ and teachers’ job satisfaction) considered in this study were potent factors to academic performance of secondary school students in the study area. Based on these findings, teacher’s content knowledge and teachers’ instructional quality could be regarded as adequate teachers’ characteristics for brilliant academic performance.

DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014.v4n6p459