Lecturers’ Workload and Productivity in Public Universities in Rivers State

Abstract:

This paper x-rayed lecturers’ workload and productivity in universities in Rivers State. Lecturers’ productivity can be said to be useful results gotten from efforts made by the lecturers to attain educational goals in the university setting. Four research questions and four corresponding null hypotheses guided the study. The theory that guided the study was Multiple Resource Theory by Christopher Wickens in (1984). The study adopted the descriptive research design. The population of this study was drawn from the three public universities located in Rivers State. There are 2,849 lecturers from the three public universities in Rivers State. The sample size for this study was 852 respondents, which will be drawn from the 3 public universities in Rivers State. To achieve this, a proportionate stratified sampling technique was used to select 367 lecturers from the University of Port Harcourt, 243 from Rivers State University, and 262 lecturers from Ignatius Ajuru University of Education. Lecturers' workload and productivity in universities questionnaire was used for data collection (LWPUQ). This instrument was face validated by experts, and the overall internal consistency reliability co-efficient index obtained through the Cronbach Alpha method was 0.83. The researcher and two research assistants collected data through the direct delivery method. Means, standard deviation, and rank order were used to answer the four research questions, while Z-test was used to test the hypotheses at a 0.05 level of significance. The findings of this study indicated to a great extent that supervision of a large number of undergraduate projects and postgraduate theses influence lecturers’ productivity in universities in Rivers State. The study, therefore, among others, recommended that the management of universities in River State should delegate some administrative duties carried out by lecturers to non-academic staff to enable them to concentrate more on teaching and research.