Performance Appraisal of Teachers in Public Secondary Schools: A Systematic Review

Marivene P. Espinosa, Jarah I. Reomero, Prima Deguito, Ruel Lugatiman, Janell Bantilan

Davao del Norte State College, New Visayas, Panabo City, Davao del Norte, Philippines

DOI: https://doi.org/10.51244/IJRSI.2023.1011030

Received: 22 October 2023; Revised: 07 November 2023; Accepted: 11 November 2023; Published: 12 December 2023

ABSTRACT

This systematic review explored the various literature on performance appraisal of teachers through the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework. This study used research from Google Scholar that was conducted between 2018 and 2022 and was written in English. This study specifically described the demographic data in the existing literature on performance appraisal of teachers in terms of country, research design, and the number of participants; the impacts and insights on teachers’ performance appraisal in public secondary schools that includes performance appraisal and teachers’ job productivity, perceived influence or impact of PA on teachers’ performance, performance practices and teachers’ perspectives, performance appraisal and teachers’ training, and performance appraisal and learners’ academic performance and recommendations for further research that can be identified by exploring the current literature. The database identified 98 pieces of literature. However, the number was narrowed down to twelve (12) after screening and determining eligibility using the inclusion-exclusion criteria, which most of the study being carried out in Africa and Asia. Furthermore, recommendations from different research studies revolve around the relationship between teachers’ performance appraisal strategies and job productivity and reward practices, the perceived influence or impact of performance appraisal on teachers’ and learners’ academic performance, teachers’ perspectives on performance appraisal, and teachers’ training needs. Finally, we hope that this study could assist both educational leaders and policymakers in formulating educational strategies concerning the evaluation of teachers’ performance. These strategies could potentially support teachers in enhancing their skills and knowledge in delivering instruction, ultimately leading to the improvement of students’ academic performance.

Keywords:  Teachers’ performance, performance appraisal, systematic review

INTRODUCTION

Resource management is the practice of planning, scheduling, and allocating people, money, and technology to a project or program. In essence, it is the process of allocating resources to achieve the organizational goals. Good resource management results in the right resources being available at the right time for the right work. Resource management is critical for organizations to ensure they are optimizing and allocating resources to the right initiatives – the initiatives that are aligned with corporate strategy and bring the most value. Program and project delivery demand better resource management. Transparency is the key to effective resource management giving project managers insight into all resources and where they are allocated across projects (Townsend, 2023).

People are one of an organization’s most valuable resources and should be properly managed. The most difficult aspect of management is dealing with people since they are rational beings who are endowed with the ability to think and make judgments and decisions based on intelligent and logical thought. Dealing with a person’s emotional side is the most difficult component of managing them, hence leaders, to be able to work well with other people, should have strong interpersonal and emotional intelligence (EQ) skills.

In the context of educational institutions, as the educational landscape changes, so does curriculum as well as teachers’ roles and responsibilities. It becomes more complicated that teachers are no longer expected to perform mere classroom duties but are also expected to implement various programs, activities, and projects which causes them to lose focus on instruction which in turn leads students to perform poor

academically. Change is inevitable. According to Leask and Terrel (1997), there will not be a period of no change because there are too many interest groups attempting to perfect different aspects of the system. The notion of continuously searching for better ways of achieving better results is not new to most teachers. One of the reforms implemented that sought to affect an increase in student performance is the development of the performance management system in schools. Evidence suggests that “teacher quality is the single most important school variable influencing student achievement” (OECD, 2005), hence the key role teaching and teachers play in enhancing student achievement is recognized.

Teacher performance management is a continual process for identifying, evaluating, and developing teachers’ work performance so that the school’s goals and objectives are more effectively achieved. It benefits teachers in terms of performance recognition, and professional development. In the school, the effectiveness of teaching learning and its continuous improvement is assured by effective monitoring and evaluation. It is the key aspect of bringing qualitative change to the education system by enhancing teaching quality (Pandey, 2021). The Department for Education and Employment’s (DfEE) Performance Management in Schools (April 2020) argues that performance management works best when it is an integral part of a school’s culture; is seen to be fair and open; understood by everyone and based on shared commitment to supporting continuous improvement and recognizing success. Mondy et al. (2002) and Dessler (2012) confirmed that one of the important practices of human resources is performance appraisal monitoring of employees in any organization. Performance appraisal has been linked with productivity, performance, efficiency, and job satisfaction in previous research. The productivity of teachers has greatly been linked to the performance of learners in many schools. Many scholars like Ariko and Simatwa (2011) have established the fact that students’ performance is due to the productivity of teachers in school. Akinyele (2010) focused on the performance part and made a remarkable statement that the system of performance appraisal is the only tangible way of knowing the performance level of its diverse employees within an organization.

Performance appraisal is a process designed to evaluate, manage and ultimately improve a teacher’s performance. It should allow the employer and teacher to openly discuss the institution’s expectations and the teacher’s achievements (OECD, 2013). Performance appraisal is defined as the assessment of the job performance levels of the employees. Improving employees’ job performance may provide a competitive advantage in two ways–by directing employees’ behavior toward organizational goals and by monitoring that behaviorto ensure that goals are met(Balatbat,2010).

Performance appraisal is also defined as a process of reviewing and evaluating an employee’s performance over a specified period of time and making plans for his or her future (Arora & Arora, 2010). Performance appraisal and development practices are a systematic process of assessing or evaluating an employee’s performance concerning its productivity, abilities, and capacities. It is a systematic evaluation of the employee’s performance to make necessary modifications or developments in needed areas (Toppo & Prusty, 2012).

In a well-designed appraisal system, the instruments and procedures can constitute valuable professional development for teachers and enable the school management to assess teachers’ performance (Teacher Performance Management. Education and Manpower Bureau, 2003). Manish and Rajneesh (2014) defined performance appraisal as the human resource management activity used to determine the extent to which the employees are performing the job. Performance appraisal can be either informal, when supervisors think about how well the employees are doing, or formal, when there is a system set up by the organization to regularly and systematically evaluate employees’ performance. Performance appraisal therefore is a systematic process of planning work and setting expectations, continually monitoring performance, periodically rating performance in a summary fashion and rewarding good performance while poor performance is remedied. According to Kanisa and Makokha (2017), performance appraisal is accorded a lesser role in most organizations especially, the educational system.

The conduct of assessment or evaluation of teachers is deemed important because it enables teachers to become more conscious of the demand of the teaching job and it also provides feedback about

their performance. According to Sapra (2012), unless individuals are provided feedback on the effects of their activities, they will not learn anything. Taking remedial action requires receiving frequent feedback that documents both successes and failures. Moreover, performance appraisal provides help to the employee focus their minds on fulfilling the organization’s demands to achieve its targets and objectives (Cintron & Flaniken, 2009). Kariethi (2018) states that the outcome performance could be the indices for taking decisions on compensation, promotion, demotion, and retention. According to Joshi (2013) performance appraisal assists in decision-making and merit rating for the promotion based on employee’s performance.

Studies, however, revealed challenges, despite the implementation of performance appraisal of teachers in schools, the poor academic achievement of students, lack of transparency and fairness, and prejudice on the part of the principals conducting the appraisal surfaced. Such evidence pointed to weaknesses in areas like poor productivity, bad leadership, teacher training, and educational policy.

To fill this gap, a systematic literature review is done to bring together all the existing research on teachers’ performance appraisal in public secondary schools that may help educational leaders as well as policymakers to come up with educational policies that could enhance students’ academic performance as an offshoot to using the teachers’ performance appraisal as a tool. Teacher appraisal can be a key lever for increasing the focus on teaching quality (OECD, 2013) many reforms in the past, however, have failed (Danielson, 2011), hence, an understanding of the various aspects of successful performance appraisal is essentials.

Research Questions

The study’s objective is to undertake a systematic review analysis of the existing research on human resource performance management systems in the educational sector, with a focus on teacher performance appraisal in public secondary schools. It seeks to answer the following research questions:

1. What demographic data is in the existing literature on the performance appraisal of teachers in terms of geographic region, research method, and areas of focus?
2. What are the varying impacts and insights of teachers’ performance appraisal in public secondary schools based on the relevant literature publications between 2018 to 2023?
3. What recommendations for practice or further research can be identified through an exploration of the current literature on the performance appraisal of teachers in public secondary schools?

METHODOLOGY

Method

To address the research issues, this study used a systematic review and analysis as the functional research design. According to Ranganathan and Aggarwal (2022), meta-analysis, a statistical approach for statistically combining the results of several research studies to produce a pooled estimate of treatment impact, is usually included in systematic reviews. Consequently, the most reliable evidence level is systematic reviews (Chandler et al., 2019). Furthermore, as shown in Figure 2, this systematic review was conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) reporting checklist (Liberati et al., 2009) Identification, screening, eligibility, and inclusion were the four stages of the procedure. For the purposes of this investigation, a thorough literature search was done to discover articles that included systematic reviews.

Figure 2

Searching, Screening, and Data Extraction

As the primary database search tool for locating the relevant literature that was used in this investigation, Google Scholar was used. Google Scholar was chosen primarily because it includes an advanced search tool that allows users to specify their desired operative terms, the portion of the study in which they were used, and the year of publication. Additionally, it provides data based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria such as full-text versions, the language used, research designs, and others. The use of keywords was applied in all searching and browsing for valid literature in both database search platforms.

Determining Criteria for Inclusion and Exclusion

Based on this study’s stated research questions and focus, the following inclusion criteria were included throughout the systematic review. Valid literature in this review was conducted in quantitative and qualitative research design containing the performance appraisal of teachers in public secondary schools. Additionally, the study should have been conducted in public school institutions, written in English, and available in open access and full text. Further, the different pieces of literature should have been published from 2018 to 2023 since the abundance of literature related to the study is evident from the last 20 years. On the contrary, studies published before 2018, not relevant to research questions, from non-public school institutions, not English, and not available in full text, were not included in the review.

Table 1. Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria of the Systematic Review

Data Extraction Procedures

An Excel file was created and encoded with the study’s data. The information relating to the research questions was immediately extracted and coded, especially for the impact and implications of the teachers’ appraisal conducted in public secondary schools as well as the proponents’ recommendations, in addition to the standard information surrounding the study like country, and research design.

Data Analysis

Beginning with the final listing of the literature, Microsoft Excel was used to create a simple tabulation of demographic data from the study year, nation, and topic area. To identify the impacts and implications, many pieces of literature were compared in light of the country’s performance appraisal strategies and practices. In addition, the evaluated data are shown in a graphical format to provide a comprehensive overview of all the data.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

FINDINGS

This section presents the findings of the review that was conducted in relation to the given research topics. The demographics of the included literature are presented in the first section along with information on the geographic region to which these studies were conducted, research designs, and the research focus of the study. The second section is impact or implications, and the final section is an evaluation of the insightful recommendations that might address the identified gaps.

Demographic Data on the Existing Literature on Teachers’ Performance Appraisal

After screening all the ninety-eight (98) literature, only twelve (12) qualifies based on the inclusion and exclusion eligibility criteria as reflected in Table 1. Table 2 below shows that most of the studies on teachers’ performance appraisal were conducted in several large geographical regions like Africa, and Asia. The data shows that 67% of these were conducted in Africa and 33% in Asia.

Table 2. Demographics of the existing literature on Teachers’ Performance Appraisal in Public Secondary schools

Figure 1 shows the graphical presentation of the demographic information on the geographic location where these research studies were carried out.

Figure 1. Graphical presentation on Geographic Location

Table 3 revealed the research methods that were employed in the different literature. Table 4 presents the demographic research focus of varying literature.

Table 3. Demographics of the employed research method on the existing literature

Table 4. Demographics in research focus on the varying literature

Varying Impacts, Influences, or Insights of Teachers’ Performance Appraisal in Public Secondary Schools

The impact, influences, and insights on teachers’ performance appraisal in public schools are reflected in Table 5 below.

Table 5. Impacts, and Insights on Teachers’ Performance Appraisal in public secondary schools

Many studies about teachers’ performance appraisals have been conducted and published, giving readers insights into how the process is carried out and how it has affected teachers in the region. Most of the research suggested that teachers’ performance appraisal has a beneficial impact on productivity. Wood (2015) described teachers’ productivity as the accomplishment of a specific task in relation to preset standards that dictate the accuracy, cost, speed, and completeness in a manner that quickens the attainment of a predetermined goal in the school. According to Prof. Glad O. Unachukwu (2021), teachers’ job productivity has to do with teachers’ dedication to executing the responsibilities assigned, in line with a set of standards. Teachers’ job productivity measures teachers’ completion of tasks effectively and efficiently based on indices for the measurement of productivity in the school.

Self-efficacy is also linked to productivity. In a teaching context, self-efficacy refers to the ability to determine the outcomes of the student’s work (Shahzad & Naureen, 2017). According to Lewis (2007), self- efficacy is a self-evaluation of whether a person feels they can accomplish a certain task or not. Efficacy beliefs have been shown to affect teacher activity and productivity. Teacher efficacy has been associated with teachers’ choice of instructional decisions in content delivery, confidence in task performance, and learner outcomes. Ashton and Webb (1998) explain that teachers who have a higher level of self-efficacy are more organized, have greater skill in instruction and questioning, have better abilities to explain, and can solve academic problems easily. Previous studies have found that employees with stronger creative self- efficacy are more likely to engage in higher levels of creativity in their work (Gong, Y. P, Huancy. J. C. and Farh, J. L, 2009). Studies indicate that highly efficacious teachers are more likely to implement instructional innovation in the classroom ( Zhao & Cziko, 2001 cited in Teo, 2009). Teachers’ competency is based on self-efficacy. When teachers are competent, they impact students’ performance. Thus, the more competent the teachers are, the more effective is the education system (Mungasia, 2022).

Performance appraisal plays a significant role in assessing and improving teachers’ performance. Through constructive feedback, teachers can gain insights into their performance and make necessary adjustments to enhance their teaching practices. This process promotes continuous professional growth and development should teachers’ training needs be identified and addressed.

Performance appraisal can also serve as a basis for recognizing and rewarding teachers’ outstanding performance. When teachers consistently demonstrate high-quality teaching practices and achieve their goals, they can be acknowledged and rewarded through various means such as salary increases, promotions, or other forms of recognition. This recognition reinforces positive performance and encourages teachers to continue delivering excellent results.

The performance appraisal of teachers can also have an impact on the student on academic performance. Performance appraisal can assess the quality of instruction provided by the teacher. Effective and engaging teaching methods, clear communication, and the ability to facilitate student learning are essential factors in promoting student academic performance. It can evaluate competence and subject knowledge. Teachers who possess a deep understanding of the subject matter are better equipped to deliver

high-quality instruction. It can assess teachers’ ability to manage student behavior, maintain discipline, and create an inclusive classroom atmosphere. When teachers are skilled in managing their classrooms, it allows students to focus on their studies, resulting in improved academic performance.

Synthesis of Recommendations on Teachers’ Performance Appraisal in Public Secondary Schools

Table 6 shows the varied recommendations from the study that education leaders and practitioners can glean for reference relative to teachers’ performance appraisals.

Table 6. Synthesis of Different Recommendation

CONCLUSION

This research provides an overview of the existing studies on the performance appraisal of teachers in secondary public schools. The data revealed insights that most performance appraisals of teachers have raised issues, which piqued researchers’ interest, especially in African and Asian regions.

The conduct of performance appraisal of teachers is a critical Human Resource activity since it entails organizational success as it influences high job productivity, self-efficacy, and competence among the teachers, and most importantly it has a considerable impact on student academic achievement.

Based on the data from the varied recommendations of this research, a teachers’ performance appraisal standard has not yet been established in the regions. Teachers’ appraisal may have been conducted though; however, intensive training will pave the way to a more thorough implementation. The conduct of regular teachers’ evaluations may also help Human Resource Management identify the training needs of the teachers which when addressed would lead to better employees and better learning outcomes for the students.

Research Agenda

This research study may aid educational leaders as well as policymakers to come up with educational policies on teachers’ performance appraisal that might help teachers advance their competence and expertise in instructional delivery which may ultimately result in improving the academic performance of the students. Researchers interested in the topic may utilize the synthesized concepts presented in the paper as a reference. A correlation between teachers’ performance appraisal results in secondary schools and school performance has yet to be explored, hence it can also be an avenue for further research.

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