Abstract:

Tertiary education has been identified as one fundamental factor in the construction of knowledge and society generally. Tertiary institutions around the world have been moving towards more business-like forms of management and governance where accountability, quality assurance and performance evaluation have become essential components of educational administration. Consequently, quality assurance reforms such as Total Quality Management have been introduced in most goal-oriented universities around the world. This movement is premised on the belief that quality of classroom instruction, most of the time, has overarching influence on the quality of education received by students. The quality of teaching in many Nigerian tertiary institutions has been noted as falling below expectation. This impacts on the quality of graduates and urgently demands to attune this education to the global best practices. Lack of appropriate evaluation and feedback mechanism in classroom activities of lecturers could be one of the reasons for this problem. The situation is not made better by the disproportionate emphasis on number of publications as criterion for teacher appraisal. Total Quality Management requires, amongst others, that students rate their teachers’ instructional practices and behaviours, the results of which the institutions will use to ensure that the teacher improves where any deficiency is reported or commend the teacher, where there is consistent satisfactory teaching. Unfortunately, many Nigerian universities are yet to benefit from the gains of this practice. In this spirit of quality assurance in Nigerian tertiary education, the researchers undertake this study to gauge lecturers’ perception of the use of students’ evaluation for their professional development and for personnel decisions such as promotion. The area of study will be Anambra State, Nigeria. Two research questions and two hypotheses will guide the study. A twenty-four-item questionnaire will be administered to a sample of two thousand, five hundred lecturers from the five government-owned tertiary institutions in the State.