Instructors’ Job Commitment: The Role of in-Service Course, Enugu State, Nigeria

Abstract

This study investigated the role in-service course plays in instructors’ job commitment. The ex-post-facto of descriptive survey method was adopted for this study. The participants were 2403 teachers in registered private secondary schools in Enugu State, from which a sample of 480 respondents was selected using a stratified sampling technique. Two instruments for data collection were self-developed entitled “In-Service Course Questionnaire (ICQ) and the Instructors’ Job Commitment Questionnaire (IJCQ). Face and content validity were employed in validating the instruments and further subjected to a reliability test, which yielded a co-efficient of .78 and .89 respectively. Analysis was done using mean rating, standard deviation, ranking and coefficient of determination while Pearson r was used to test the hypothesis at a significance level of 0.05. Findings show that seminars, workshops, orientation, lesson study, classroom/school visitation, further study, study groups, online training, mentorships, peer coaching, teachers’ conventions, and conferences were commonly used in-service course programs in private secondary schools in Enugu state. In addition, the level of instructors’ job commitment in private secondary schools in Enugu state was high. Furthermore, there was a significant relationship between instructors’ job commitment and in-service courses in Enugu State. Accordingly, it was recommended that school proprietors/proprietresses and principals of private secondary schools in the state of Enugu should routinely conduct intense and sufficient in-service course programs for teachers.