RELIABILITY ISSUES IN TEACHING PRACTICE ASSESSMENT: A CASE STUDY OF RATING UNIVERSITY PRE-SERVICE TEACHING PRACTICE

The need to ensure quality in assessing pre-service students on teaching practice so that decision
made on their performance is reliable and valid necessitated that reliability and validity of rating
them is always determined. It is important that students on pre-service teaching practice are
reliably and validly assessed. Nevertheless available evidence hardly shows that this is the
practice in teacher training institutions in Nigeria. In the absence of sufficient empirical evidence
to show that pre-service students on teaching practice are reliably and validly rated, the study
investigated the extent to which pre-service students on teaching practice are rated in Ibadan
North. Three research questions guided the study. A survey research type of an ex-post facto
design was adopted. The population of the study was 550 pre-service students on teaching
practice in the Faculty of Education, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. A simple random sampling
technique was used to select a sample of two hundred and twenty students for the study. The
scores of examiners that rated the students were collated and analysed using PPMC and Cohen’s
kappa weighted coefficient. Findings revealed among others a significant moderate correlation
between examiners rating teaching practice students. It was recommended that teacher training
institutions should give adequate attention to rating of students on teaching practice to ensure
that their rating is reliable and valid.