WORKLOAD FACTORS AND TEACHERS JOB PERFORMANCE IN PUBLIC JUNIOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN EDUCATION
ABSTRACT
The goal of this study is to determine how much workload factors (such as working hours, class size, teacher-student ratio, committee assignment, and nature of work) influence teacher job performance in public secondary schools in Lagos State’s Education District III.
The study employed a descriptive survey design, with the population consisting of 960 teachers from the District’s 66 public junior secondary schools, and the Sloven formula of sample size was used to select 280 teachers from the total population of 960.
The research instrument was chosen and administered using stratified and random sampling techniques. The study’s research instrument was a self-created questionnaire. To analyze the demographic characteristics of participants and all research questions, descriptive statistics such as frequency count and simple percentage were used, while the chi-square statistical tool was used to test the research hypotheses.
According to the findings of the study, working hours, class size, teacher-student ratio, committee assignment, and nature of work all have an impact on a teacher’s job performance. As a result, it was recommended that school administrators be aware of their teachers’ health status by improving work efficiency through health-prone working hours and time management,
maintaining a sizeable classroom that will enhance academic excellence of students and effective teaching of teachers, playing a significant role in promoting student-teacher interaction and a significant student-teacher ratio in order to enhance an improved academic performance.
Teachers should be involved in school decision-making and play an active role in the effective administration of the school in order to promote improved job performance among teachers who are assigned to work that they find convenient and appealing. Its purpose is to increase teacher satisfaction and job satisfaction.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
The Study’s Background
The improvement of Nigerian employees’ performance in various sectors of the economy, including school organization, has been a recurring theme of many symposia, conferences, and workshops. It is widely acknowledged that performance is a critical factor in any nation’s socioeconomic development, as it is one of the primary determinants of the citizenry’s standard of living.
There is no doubt that improved performance is at the heart of all organizations’ activities, including schools, implying that the survival and growth of most human understandings are heavily reliant on the organization’s level of performance, which is reliant on employee performance. As a result, the performance of any employee, including a teacher, is heavily influenced by the workload.
Workload management in school is an important aspect that can make or break educational goals. This is due to the fact that if these tasks or duties are not efficiently coordinated, the expected results will be far from realized.
According to Nweke and Dollah (2011), a teacher’s workload is defined as the totality of academic teaching work and committee workload assigned to a teacher for the achievement of the school’s overall educational objectives.
This includes lesson note preparation, test and assignment, examination, house mastership, and any other routine work that the principal may assign to a teaching staff. Workload is defined as the physiological and mental demands that occur while performing a task or a combination of tasks, according to Sinclair, as cited in Usoro, Nnaessien, and Saleh (2007), and it can also be the physical and/or mental requirements associated with a task or combination of tasks.
This means that workload is the cost borne by an individual, given their abilities, while performing at a specific level of performance on a job with specific demands; it is the perception of having too many things to do or not having enough time to do the things one has to do.
It is the portion of an employee’s limited capacity that is actually required to perform a specific task. Tasks are defined by their structural properties. A set of stimuli and responses are specified by rules that map responses to stimuli. Teaching units/working units, class size, teacher-student ratio, committee assignment, student assessment, and nature of work are all workload factors.
Organizations may be unable to hire a sufficient number of employees due to limited resources, such as a limited budget and staff. As a result, the organization assigns employees tasks that are not part of their job descriptions, increasing their workload. Workload is classified as physical or mental by Kawada, Ueda, Hayashi, Sakamoto, Uchida, Shirato, and Etoh (2010).
The technical requirements for processing the work, both inside and outside the workplace, create physical workload. This refers to the measurable portion of physical resources expended when performing a specific task, which is influenced by a variety of factors.
However, mental workload is the amount of processing capacity required for a subject to complete a task at a given time. This means that it is a feature of information processing and control systems that acts as a bridge between stimuli, rules, and responses.
It is critical to identify the elements that organizations must consider in order to reduce employee workload. To begin, they must identify the critical factor that has the greatest impact on an employee’s workload. Following that, the organization must take the appropriate steps to reduce workload.
It is obvious that organizations, particularly human research departments, should think about this issue. Work schedules, working days, job descriptions, and job specifications, among other things, should be clearly defined (Guimares, Pessa, & Biguelini, 2012).
As a result, a teacher can be overburdened with work, i.e., have too many teaching units and committee assignments, or underburdened, i.e., have too few teaching units assigned (Zwalchir & Buenyen, 2009). Because the principal is the only administrator who assigns workload to the teaching staff, he or she must be proactive in order to avoid over- or under-utilization of teaching staff for the sake of goal attainment and fruitful performance.
In the same vein, the principal is responsible for monitoring the class size taught by the teacher, as a large class size represents an excessive workload for the teacher. With our schools’ increasing enrollment, teachers can be compensated for extra work (Adu, Titilola & Ifeoma, 2013).
They also emphasized that the principal’s workload distribution is determined by the school’s teaching staff strength. Where this is small, the workload per teacher will be high, and some work will be left undone. This is to blame for some subjects not being taught unless the principal hires a helping teacher who may or may not be competent in the subject; as a result, quality or effectiveness suffers.
According to Arora (2009), quality is conformance to a requirement or specification. Thus, in this direction, the productivity of teaching staff is directly related to the workload assigned to that staff.
The performance of a teaching staff is a measure of the degree of effectiveness and efficiency with which the workload is completed within a given time frame, culminating in the achievement of school objectives. Usoro et al. (2007) agreed that performance is measured in terms of how students appreciated and assimilated the teacher’s lesson.
The size of the class can influence the rate of comprehension. A large class will be difficult to control effectively, which contradicts the tenets of classroom management training. If the 1:40 teacher-student ratio is maintained in public senior secondary schools, classroom management will be more effective.
Related: Factors Undermining Students’ Performance in Applied Electricity in Technical Colleges
Clearly, the quality of education in Nigeria, particularly in secondary schools, has been a source of public concern in recent years.
The main focus of such public concern is the deterioration of education standards and the urgent need to correct the situation in order to avoid further deterioration.
Ajayi (2000) attests to this in an address given at the national workshop on planning and administration for the successful implementation of the Universal Basic Education (UBE) program in Nigeria, where he states that a cursory look at the education scenario in
Nigeria presents no less a picture of poor quality education and then goes on to posit that poor planning models, weak school administration and management, low teacher productivity resulting from low teachers’ adherence to the curriculum, and low teacher productivity resulting from low teachers’ adherence
Given the preceding scenario, the importance of good secondary school administration and management becomes critical. In the secondary school system, the principal is in charge of administration and management, while teachers and students are primarily in charge of teaching and learning. The teacher, according to Jaiyeoba (2008), holds a central position in the instructional setting.
This is aptly stated by Adesokan (2000), who claims that the teacher is the spark and key man in our educational enterprise’s drive for progress. The teacher, as expected, will be unable to complete the difficult and necessary assignment on his or her own. In order to achieve the goals of providing good instruction in the classroom, he must collaborate with other stakeholders such as the principal, other teachers, students, and parents.
Problem Statement
Education is the foundation of development, and teachers play a critical role in the education sector’s product and outcome. There have been reports of teachers consistently performing poorly on the job and students performing poorly in core and major subjects at the Senior Secondary School level of education. This can be attributed to the increased workload of teachers in schools, which has resulted in a decline in teacher job performance.
Workload is on the front burner when it comes to the quality or effectiveness of education, because workload determines the level of teacher job performance to a large extent. There is widespread concern about the deterioration
of educational quality, as products of our educational system, including senior secondary school, are unable to adequately demonstrate their worth. The situation is deteriorating due to a lack of teacher staff strength in schools, resulting in a heavy workload on the available teaching staff.
The main problem statement is thus, to what extent do workload factors (such as working hours, class size, teacher-student ratio, committee assignment, and nature of work) influence teacher job performance in public secondary schools in Lagos State’s Education District III?
The Study’s Purpose
The primary goal of this study was to determine how workload factors influence teacher job performance in public junior secondary schools in Lagos State’s Education District III. The study specifically states:
1. to investigate the impact of working hours on teacher job performance;
2. to ascertain the extent to which class size affects teacher performance;
3. to investigate how the teacher-student ratio affects teacher job performance;
4. to determine the extent to which committee assignment affects teacher job performance
5. to investigate how the nature of the work affects the performance of teachers on the job.
Research Issues
To guide and direct the investigation, the following research questions were used:
1. How much do working hours affect a teacher’s job performance?
2. How does class size affect teacher performance?
3. How does the teacher-student ratio affect teacher performance?
4. To what extent does a teacher’s membership on a committee affect his or her job performance?
5. To what extent does the nature of one’s work improve one’s job performance as a teacher?
Hypotheses for Research
To guide the research, the following null hypotheses were developed:
H01: Working hours have no discernible effect on teacher job performance.
H02: Class size has no effect on a teacher’s job performance.
H03: The teacher-student ratio has no effect on teacher job performance.
H04: Committee assignments have no significant impact on teacher job performance.
H05: The nature of work has no significant impact on teacher job performance.
The Study’s Importance
The study’s findings will provide general knowledge on workload factors and teacher job performance. The findings will add to the body of knowledge that can be used to organize seminars and workshops on how to reduce teachers’ workload in public secondary schools in order to improve students’ academic performance and teachers’ job performance in achieving educational goals.
The findings could also be used by the Ministry of Education’s human resources department and other policy-making bodies, particularly in the formulation of policies that will help to ensure a reduction in teachers’ workload, which will help to improve the effectiveness of the teaching-learning process.
This study’s findings will also reveal the best organizational structure for improving students’ academic performance in schools and teachers’ job performance.
The Study’s Scope
The study primarily focused on workload factors and teacher job performance. The study primarily targeted public secondary school teachers. The study only looks at Education District III in Lagos state. Working hours, class size, teacher-student ratio, committee assignment, and nature of work were all factors considered in the study.
Terminology Definitions
Class size refers to the number of students enrolled in a given course or classroom, more specifically (1) the number of students taught by individual teachers in a course or classroom or (2) the average number of students taught by teachers in a school, district, or education system.
The nature of work refers to the basic daily tasks that he performs as part of his job, but it can also refer to other non-routine tasks that may be required by the job.
The student-teacher ratio denotes the relationship between the number of students enrolled in a school, district, or educational system and the number of full-time equivalent teachers employed by the school, district, or system.
Teacher job performance refers to the teaching work activities that are expected of a teacher and how well those teaching activities were carried out. This refers to the level of productivity of teachers in a school system.
Workload factors are the physiological and mental demands that arise while performing a task or a set of tasks. These are the following factors: teaching units/working units, class size, teacher-student ratio, committee assignment, student evaluation, and nature of work.
Working hours: the amount of time an individual devotes to paid occupational labor.
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