Perception of Technology Education Lecturers about Technical Education Research and Evaluation in South-South Nigerian State Universities
Odu Oji Kennedy *
Department of Technical Education, Delta State University, Abraka, Nigeria.
Agbata Ikechukwu Victor
Department of Technical Education, Delta State University, Abraka, Nigeria.
Aiminhiefe Margaret Igensekhien
Department of Technical Education, Delta State University, Abraka, Nigeria.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Research in technical education helps the teachers to teach more effectively, it improves the standard of production, or fabrication, it enhance our maintenance ability or culture and helps to produce the much needed technological literature. The study was designed to ascertain the perception of Technology Education lecturers toward technical education research and evaluation in south-south geo-political zone of Nigeria. In pursuance of this purpose, five research questions were formulated and four hypotheses tested. The population comprised of all the 70 technical/technology education lecturers, seven Vice-Chancellors and fourteen Deputy-Vice Chancellors, (Administration and Academics) respectively in state universities in south-south geopolitical zone of Nigeria which includes Akwa-Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross-River, Delta, Edo and Rivers States. The entire population of ninety-one (91) participants were used as sample due to fewness of the population. The ex-post facto research design was adopted and the instrument comprised 68-item questionnaire which was constructed based on a 5-point likert scale. The instrument contains six sections (i.e section A and sections B1 to B5). The instrument was considered valid by three experts in technical education and measurement and evaluation with the reliability coefficient of 0.87 using Cronbach alpha. Mean, standard deviation and t-test were used to analyse the data. The study revealed that government inactive role in supporting and promoting technical education research in state universities caused low morale of lecturers towards technical education research, A lot of constraints such as poor attitude to research, falsification of research data, among others are the challenges of technical education research and evaluation in state universities in south-south Nigeria. The study recommends that about 10 percent (10%) of the education tax fund should be voted to technical education research and government should improve it’s communication network.
Keywords: Technical education, research and evaluation practices, lecturer perception, South–South Nigeria