Determination of Quality Assurance of Agricultural Education Lecturers in Soil Conservation for Effective Teaching of Students in Colleges of Education in North Central Nigeria

Abstract

The study determined the quality assurance of Agricultural Education lecturers in soil conservation for effective teaching of students in colleges of education in North Central Nigeria. Three objectives guided the study, while three research questions were answered and three corresponding null hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. Survey research design was adopted for the study. The entire population of 239 respondents made up of 47 Soil Science lecturers, 26 Agricultural Education lecturers in all the public universities in North Central Nigeria and 166 Agricultural Education lecturers in all the fourteen public Colleges of Education in North Central Nigeria were used for the study. A 118 –item structured questionnaire titled: Quality Assurance of Lecturers in Soil Conservation Questionnaire (QALSCOQ) developed by the researcher from literature reviewed, was used to collect data from the respondents. Each QALSCOQ item was divided into two categories of required and performance. The required category had a 4 response options of Highly Needed (HN), averagely Needed (AN), Slightly Needed (SN) and Not Needed (NN). The performance category also had 4 response options of High Performance (HP), Average Performance (AP), Low Performance (LP) and No Performance (NP). The questionnaire items were face validated by five experts. The internal consistency of the questionnaire was determined using Cronbach alpha method and coefficients of 0.91 and 0. 93 were obtained for needed and performance categories respectively. 239 copies of the QALSCOQ were administered on the respondents with the help of five research assistants but only 229(95.81% copies of the QALSCOQ administered were retrieved and analyzed. Weighted mean and Need-Performance Index (NPI) were used to answer the research questions while chi-square statistic was used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study revealed that Agricultural Education lecturers are of low quality assurance in 48 measures in soil erosion prevention and 49 techniques in manure preparation and application and 21 practices on crop rotation techniques for effective teaching of students in Colleges of Education in North Central Nigeria. The study further revealed that Agricultural Education lecturers significantly possess low quality assurance in soil erosion prevention, manure preparation and application and crop rotation techniques for effective teaching of students in Colleges of Education in North Central Nigeria. Based on the findings of the study, it was therefore recommended amongst others that; Agricultural Education lecturers in Colleges of Education should utilize the findings to seek for sponsorship from their administrators in order to attend retraining programme for their capacity building in soil conservation.