An Appraisal Mechanism for Improving Teaching Service Delivery in Universities

Most universities have set up appraisal of lecturers’ class competencies to be done by students. The setbacks have been that students don’t feel free to give honest assessment, difficulty in collating the appraisal results, lecturers not trusting an appraisal system done solely by only students, and the assessment not considering positive or negative factors affecting teaching delivery. These taken together, have led to de-emphasis on teaching delivery appraisal. To solve this, questions that better reflect what defines of a good lecturer were modeled to achieve validity. The system was set up to protect anonymity of the students appraising staff. The work also presents a mathematical model that factors in the complexity of teaching to achieve fairness. An interaction of three weights (class size, credit unit and number of lecturers taking the course) was used to attain fairness and foster lecturers’ trust in this single-source appraisal. The grand or final teaching delivery score is a weighted average of the assessment scores computed from each of the courses taken by the appraised lecturer in the year under consideration. A web-based application was developed to deploy the appraisal mechanism advanced in this work. The application proved an effective platform for easy collation of appraisal outcome, roll out of questions covering multiple aspects of teaching delivery that improve learning and assessable by students. The interaction of three weights ensured that this single-source appraisal is not tilted unduly against the appraised staff while not unmasking the evaluators.