Development and Evaluation of a Web Based System for Students’ Appraisal on Teaching Performance of Lecturers

Appraisal of lecturers’ effectiveness on teaching performance is an administrative duty of educational administrators which is intended to ascertain whether or not lecturers are performing their duty adequately. Most existing appraisal systems (especially in Nigeria) are superior based thus preventing the students that are direct recipients of lecturers’ output to evaluate the teaching competencies of their lecturers. Also, appraisal results that are students’ based are reported questionable in terms of its validity and reliability as the outcome of the evaluation reported biased assessment due to lecturers’ coercion of students into giving falsified evaluation reports or intentional falsification of judgements about a lecturer by sets of students. This study developed a system for students’ appraisal on teaching performance of lecturers (SATP) characterised by support for reduction of students’ partiality and prejudice during appraisal on lecturers’ effectiveness. Domain Driven Design was employed in designing the SATP client-server architecture and its framework. The SATP was programmed using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. Afterwards, 60 students were allowed to use the system to evaluate 6 lecturers in computer science department, Federal College of Wildlife Management which serves as the purposively selected research domain. The evaluation data obtained from the system were statistically evaluated to determine SATP performance (suitability, effectiveness and ability to detect falsified evaluation) using t-test at 0.10 level of significance. The results of performance evaluation revealed that SATP was found to be visually suitable and effective for lecturers’ evaluation. More so, evaluation data reported as not been falsified by SATP also recorded insignificant differences (∆μ = 0.36, p>0.10) in first and second evaluation while evaluation data reported as been falsified by SATP recorded significant differences (∆μ = 12.22, p<0.10) in first and second appraisal (evaluation). The study concluded that the result of evaluation of lecturers retrieved from the developed SATP is valid and recommend the adoption of the system in tertiary institutions as it will improve the excellence of educators and academics in tertiary institutions.