Abstract:

The evaluation of a lecturer by a student is an essential step in determining the success of the learning process. This often requires the development and standardization of data gathering instruments. The development and standardization of a data gathering instrument is hardly complete without the establishment of its reliability and validity. Of more importance is the validity index. An instrument can be reliable without being valid, but hardly can the instrument be valid without being reliable. Validity, therefore, subsumes the concept of reliability. The practical implication of this submission is that validity is an imperative requirement in the standardization and hence utilization of all data gathering instruments. Using an un-validated instrument could be disastrous. It is against this background it was deemed necessary to ascertain the validity of the recently developed Covenant University Students’ evaluation of Lecturers’ teaching competence instrument tagged Lecturers’ Teaching Competence Evaluation Form – Students’ Version [LTCEF-SV]. To achieve this objective the 7083 students and 21 Heads of Departments of Covenant University participated in the study. After a close scrutiny of recent submission in the literature on the indicators of effective teaching at the secondary and tertiary levels, the LTCEF-SV was developed using the Participatory Research Approach [PAR]. Consequently, Students, Lecturers and Management were actively involved in the process of developing the LTCEF-SV. This step, together with expert’s review of the instrument served to establish the content validity of the instrument. Nonetheless, it was deemed imperative that the Criterion-related validities [i.e. concurrent and predictive] be established. For this study, the Concurrent validity was established with correlation of scores from student’s evaluation and Heads of departments’ evaluation of the same set of lecturers around the same period while the Predictive validity was established with correlation of scores from students’ evaluation of lecturers and students’ performance score in the 2013/14 Alpha semester’s examination The results mostly showed weak and insignificant Concurrent and Predictive validities. The findings were discussed while relevant recommendations were made.

Keywords:

Criterion-related validity, Concurrent validity, Predictive validity, Evaluation, Instruments and Standardization