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EFFECT OF UNQUALIFIED TEACHERS OF COMPUTER SCIENCE ON TEACHING AND LEARNING OF COMPUTER

CHAPTER ONE

1.0  INTRODUCTION

A teacher or school teacher is a person who provides education for public (children) and students (adults).  The role of teacher is often formal and ongoing, carried out at a school or other place of formal education.  In many countries, a person who wishes to become a teacher must first obtain specified professional qualifications or credentials from a university or college.  These professional qualifications may include the study of pedagogy, the science of teaching. Teachers, like other professionals, may have to continue their education their education after they qualify, a process known as continuing professional development.  Teachers may use a lesson plan to facilitate student learning, providing a course of study which is called the curriculum.

Competence (or competence) is the ability of an individual to do a job properly.  A competency is a set of defined behaviours that provide a structured guide enabling the identification, evaluation and development of the behaviours in individual employees.  The term “competence” first appeared in an article authored by R.W White in 1959 as a concept for performance motivation.  Later, in 1970, Craig C. Lundberg defined the concept in “Planning the Executive Development Programme”.  The term gained, “Testing for Competence Rather than for Intelligence”.  It was since been popularized by one time fellow Mcber and Company (Currently the “Hay GroupJ colleague Richard Boyatzis and many others, such as T.F. Gilbert (2008) who used the concept in relationship to performance improvement.  Its use varies widely, which leads to considerable misunderstanding.

The school environment has a strong positive relationship with students’ rating of their overall school satisfaction, students’ self-esteem, and academic performance.  Teacher’s competency enhances a teacher’s ability to create an environment that is fair, understanding, and accepting of diverse students, ideas, experiences, and backgrounds.  Teachers have been found to be the single most important factor influencing student achievement (Cochran-Smith, 2002; Kaplan and Owings, 2002; Lasley, Siedentop, and Yinger, 2006).  The present study will focus on factors which may influence teacher’s competency in classroom situation, including teacher use of continuous Assessment; a technology-based tool the teacher can use for communication with students.

 A study of teacher classroom practices as they relate to student achievement is important for several reasons.  Understanding the reasons why the teacher is important will give insight to professional development planners.  Identifying such factors contributing to increased student achievement is paramount in this age of accountability.  The federal of Nigeria mandates for student achievement through the various examination bodies are not going away; schools are held accountable through statewide assessments of all students.  Teachers need to be held to high standards and implement research-based best practices in their classrooms. Identifying factors contributing to student achievement is very important.  Regarding leadership, the principal indirectly impacts the performance of teachers under his or her leadership as well as the climate and culture of the building (Stewart, 2008).

The idea of highly qualified teachers is a good one, but compliance has not been widespread (Viadero, 2007).  Some states in Nigeria have set low expectations for teacher quality, and sometimes it depends it depends on what school in which a teacher teaches in.  The question which begs to be asked is what defines teacher quality?  If a student is asked about a teacher a teacher who is highly qualified, they will most likely say that it is the teachers who spend extra time with them and who makes the class content clear and attainable  (Lewis, 2005).  Conversely, the unqualified teachers are the ones who are boring and don’t connect with them.  Students don’t care about educational certificates or years of experience.  Anobi (2006) recognizes that as true educators, teachers are always learning; and teachers need to continue to define the meaning of highly qualified, instead of doing as little as possible within the meaning of the law.  As teachers, educators need to move from mere competence to excellence in practice.

       Defining teacher quality is a question that resurfaces again in the literature on teacher preparation.  Does content knowledge in addition to knowledge about teaching make a difference in student achievement (Kaplan and Owings, 2001)?  One group believes quality teachers possess content knowledge and have studied instructional ideas and practices that have increased student achievement, while another group believes teachers just need strong content knowledge.  Kaplan and Owing (2001) found disagreement in the literature over whether traditional teacher preparation positively affected student achievement.  They found that teachers who learn and practice sound pedagogical practices techniques can affect students’ measured achievements and also students whose teachers had strong content knowledge and had learned to work with students who came from different cultures or special needs tested higher than one full grade over their peers.

Academic performance means how students deal with their studies and how they cope with or accomplish various tasks given to them by their teachers.   Academic performance of the student is also defined as the ability of the student to study and remember facts and being able to communicate his knowledge orally or on paper Johnson (2010).  Researchers reveal that there are various factors responsible for the unsatisfactory academic performance of the students.  These factors are poverty, extraordinary co-curricular activities, ineffective teaching and administration, absenteeism, lack of basic educational facilities, culture, and trend of unfair means during examination inside the school etc.  The student living in the rural areas is directly affected with these factors. Therefore, the researchers want to investigate the causes of this fallen standard and unsatisfactory academic performance of the students.  For this purpose, the study in hand was conducted to investigate the factors responsible for the poor academic performance of the students at secondary level.

Computer Science Education as it was stipulated by the National policy on education in Nigerian curriculum has been seen as an important step forward and one of the pre-vocational subjects in the secondary schools. Computers play a very important role in education, computer as a tool for study, computer science as a discipline or a profession.

Computer as a medium for instruction. Computer as a medium for teaching and learning necessitates changes in curriculum. The aim and objectives of the federal government in these pre-vocational subjects mostly is that at the end of Twelve years of passing through, it should possess an appropriate level of practical literacy, numeracy and communication, in order to be employable and useful to oneself and the society at large, but very little regarding to those aims are achieving the goals, due to the lack of planning & implementation, inadequate technique, in conducive environment, unqualified teachers, lack of computer accessories, lack of teaching aids and generally problems of teaching practical in Public Secondary Schools. Majority of teachers in public schools are still computer illiterate, while the situation in private schools is rather different.

Therefore, this work is attempted to find out the prospect solution to all these problems on the study of practical computer science in UST.

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