Levels of Implementation of Quality Assurance in Colleges of Education in South-South Region of Nigeria

Colleges of Education in Nigeria are established with the sole mandate to train competent, knowledgeable, resourceful, conscientious, and highly motivated teachers for the Basic Education level. Therefore, there is need for appropriate mechanism to be put in place for the actualization of the Institution’s mandate. In order to achieve the objectives of establishing Colleges of Education, quality assurance is mandatorily required. This research work centered on the level of implementation of quality assurance in Colleges of Education in South-South Region of Nigeria. Five research questions and five hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. A descriptive survey design was adopted and a research instrument titled: ‘Level of Implementation of Quality Assurance Mechanism in Colleges of Education (LIQAMCE) was used to generate data for the study. The population comprised of all the Colleges of Education and staff in the South- South Region of Nigeria. A purposeful sample of six Colleges was selected and one hundred (100) respondents comprising teaching and non-teaching staff were selected from each of the six colleges. The total respondents sample was 600. The main thrust of the study was to determine the level of implementation of quality assurance in Colleges of Education in relation to; its existence of directorate/units, appropriateness in composition of membership committee, compliance to guiding principles and roles of quality assurance, lecturer’s/students ratio and accreditation/ re-accreditation status. A descriptive analysis technique and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were used to test the research questions and hypotheses respectively. The results showed a very high percentage that there are existence of quality assurance directorates/units in Colleges, high percentage in disagreement with the appropriate composition of membership, high percentage revealed compliance to the guiding principles and roles, lecturers/students ratio and accreditation/re-accreditation status respectively. The findings using the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) statistics revealed significant in the existence of quality assurance directorates/units, membership composition, compliance to guiding principles and roles, lecturers’/students ratio and accreditation/re-accreditation status. This means that all the variables under study influence or enhances Colleges of Education in Nigeria. The paper therefore, recommends, among others, that the National Commission for Colleges of Education should strictly supervise, monitor and evaluate Colleges regularly to ensure that they complied with policies in relation to quality assurance geared towards producing quality teachers for Basic Education.