Influence Of Teachers’ Characteristics On Students’ Academic Performance In Biology
[SELECTED SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN ILORIN METROPOLIS]

Teacher’s Years of Teaching Experiences and Students’ Academic Performance
Teacher experience has a significant effect on pupil performance in primary schools and at upper secondary level. Experienced teachers have a richer background of experience to draw from and can contribute insight and ideas to the course of teaching and learning, are open to correction and are less dictatorial in classroom. Teachers’ experience and student achievement was that students taught by more experienced teachers achieve at a higher level, because their teachers have mastered the content and acquired classroom management skills to deal with different types of classroom problems (Gibbons et al., 2001). Furthermore, more experienced teachers are considered to be more able to concentrate on the most appropriate way to teach particular topics to students who differ in their abilities, prior knowledge and backgrounds (Stringfield &Teddlie, 2000).
The importance of experienced teachers in schools has been argued as being necessary for school effectiveness. This suggests that many experienced teachers might have left the school system probably as a result of better job prospects in other sectors of the economy. However, the desire by government to engage more teachers of long years standing is perhaps hampered by the high cost of education. Hence, Adeyemi (2008) exclaimed that the more experienced teachers in a school system, the higher would be the recurrent cost of education. As such, Charles (2002) suggested the need to involve retired teachers because of their long years of teaching experience to teach in Nigerian schools. Several studies have found a positive effect of experience on teachers’ effectiveness; specifically, the learning by doing” effect is most obvious in the early years of teaching (Bauer, 2005).
Teacher’s attendance of in–service training is one of the indicators of experience. Teachers’ motives to attend in-service training can be manifold e.g. increase in salary, career planning, keeping up with developments, filling in lacunae, removing insecurity and meeting colleagues. In the Science Education Project in South Africa (SEP),the objectives were mainly formulated by the developers after having consulted various experts who had experience with Education in Africa. The teachers in this program had been and did not have any experience with practical work. Only in a later stage of their in-service training course they had a better idea of the possible content and methods, did formulating objectives of their own lessons become part of the program (Fullan, 2002).
Therefore, the more the teachers know about students, the better the teachers can connect with them and the more likely they will be able to benefit from the teachers’ experience in reconstructing their world. The knowledge that teachers need about students in order to connect with them is gained through interaction. For many reasons, measuring the real impact of experience on a teacher’s effectiveness is complex, more so than measuring any other teacher attribute. Consequently, many well-constructed research attempts to interpret the relationship between experience and effectiveness have produced varying results that reveal no particular pattern.