STRATEGIES FOR IMPROVING TEACHERS’ COMMITMENT TO DUTIES IN PUBLIC SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN ORASHI REGION OF RIVER STATE.

by
WOKO, OSIMA FRED
Abstract
Teachers’ commitment to duties is pivotal to the attainment of educational goals. Thisstudy
therefore empirically investigated strategies for improving teachers’ commitment to duties in
public secondary schools in Orashi Region of Rivers State. Three research objectives, three
research questions and three null hypotheses were formulated a guide to the study. Thestudy
adopted a descriptive correlational research design since it sought to describe relationship
among variables. The population of study comprised of 3,507 teachers from publicsecondary
schools in the four local government areas of Orashi Region of Rivers State. Whilethe sample
size of 346 was derived using the Krejcie and Morgan formula for sample determination. A
self-designed research instrument titled Strategies for Improving Teachers’ Commitment
Questionnaire (SITCQ) was used to gather data for this research work. The instruments were
validated by two experts while the reliability coefficient of the subscale of the SITCQ are,
reward system subscale, job security, participation in decision making and teacher job
commitment were calculated to be 0.77, 0.85, 0.81 and 0.73 respectively. Mean and standard
deviation were used to answer the research questions while simple linear regressionwas used
to test the null hypotheses. The findings of the study reveal that all three variablestested:
reward system (r = 0.892); job security(r = 0.828) and participation in decision making(r =
0.738) significantly improves teachers’ job commitment in public secondary schools in
Orashi region of Rivers state. Premised on these findings, it was recommended that
educational administrators should ensure that reward system, job security are provided for and
teachers be allowed to participate in the decision making of the school, since the study reveals
that they improve teachers’ job commitment.
Keywords: Teachers’ commitment, reward system, job security, participation in decision
making.
Introduction
Education is a catalyst for societal and individual change. It is an imperative tool for
reforms because it develops and cultivatesthe capacity of human elementsin a terrain. Through
education the skills and potentials of the learner is unlocked. Societal norms, values along with
skill, information, attitude, awareness, abilities and competence are transferred to learners
through education. The overall accomplishment of an educational institution is determined by
the teachers’ commitment which is directly connected to the level of motivation they have
within the institution. Teachers commitment is the key element that describes how and why
teachers care about the school, theirstudentslearning and wellbeing, they their emotionsin their
work and their students. Commitment influences teachers’ effort to work and perform
obligatory duties.
Coladarci (2002) opined that commitment describes the teachers’ mental attachment to…