INFLUENCE OF TEACHERS TRAINING AND QUALIFICATION AS DETERMINANTS OF STUDENTS ACADEMIC ENGAGEMENT IN PUBLIC SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN ANAMBRA STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

The study investigated the influence of teachers training and qualifications as determinant of the students' learning activities in public secondary school in Anambra State Nigeria. Two research questions and two null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significant. The descriptive survey research design was adopted for the study. The population of the study comprised of 4947 teachers from all the 267 public secondary schools in the six education zones of the State. The sample of this study was 257 teachers which was 10% drawn from the population of three education zones of public secondary schools in Anambra State. This was achieved through the application of cluster sampling technique and a simple random sampling technique. Three instruments were used to collect data for the study.  The first instrument is titled “Teacher Training Questionnaire (TTQ)” the second instrument is titled “Teacher qualification Questionnaire (TQQ)” while the three instrument is titled “Students’ Academic Engagement Questionnaire (SAEQ)”. The instruments were validated by three experts all from Faculty of Education, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University, Igbariam. To establish the reliability estimate of instruments, a single administration of the instruments was adopted for pilot testing.  Cronbach Alpha was used to measure the internal consistency of the instruments and reliability co-efficient values of 0.88 for teachers training questionnaire, 0.87 for teachers’ qualification questionnaire and 0.82 for students’ academic engagement questionnaire were obtained for each of the clusters respectively. The data were collected by the researcher with the help of three research assistants who are teachers in the secondary schools. Data collected were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 26. The research questions were analyzed using mean and standard deviation and independent t-test was used for hypothesis tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study result showed that teachers training and qualification had very high significant correlation with students’ academic engagement. Based on the findings of the study it was recommended that Post Primary School Service Commission (PPSSC) should pay adequate attention to improving teachers’ acquisition of practical teaching skills by organizing training workshops for teachers at least twice in a year.