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

Murnane (2006) found that teacher effectiveness improves rapidly over the first three years of teaching and reaches its highest point between the third and fifth year but found no substantial improvement after year five. In contrast, a small number of studies suggest that teacher experience effects may be evident for a longer period of time. Murnane and Phillips (2001) state that experience had a significant positive effect on elementary student achievement among teachers during their first seven years of teaching. Ferguson (2001) reveals that at the high school level, students taught by teachers with more than nine years of experience had significantly higher test scores than students whose teachers had five to nine years of experience. Rivers and Sanders (2002) suggest that teacher’ effectiveness increases dramatically each year during the first ten years of teaching. In the extreme case, Glatfelter et al., (2007) found evidence of growing teacher effectiveness out to 20 or more years in their analyses of North Carolina teacher data, although more than half of the gains in teacher effectiveness occurred during theirs few years of teaching. Stronge et al. (2007) assert a positive relationship between teachers' verbal ability and composite student achievement, verbal ability has been considered an indicator of teacher quality. The basiclogic is that teachers rely on talk to teach (explaining, questioning, and providing directions). What verbal ability means and how to measure it, it turns out, are not straightforward. Lai (2011) measured teachers' verbal ability with a 30-item sentence completion test. Thus, though talk about the importance of teachers' verbal ability persists, it is not a strong measure of teacher quality.
According to Zuzovsky (2003), Studies on the effect of teacher experience on student learning have found a positive relationship between teacher effectiveness and their years of experience, but not always a significant or an entirely linear one. Evidence currently available suggests that while inexperienced teachers are less effective than more senior teachers, the benefits of experience appear to level off after a few years (Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2000). The relationship between teacher experience and student achievement is difficult to interpret since this variable is highly affected by market conditions or motivation to work during child rearing period. Harris and Sass (2007) point to a selection bias that can affect the validity of drawing conclusions about the effect of teacher's years of experience. If less effective teachers are more likely to leave the professions, this may give the mistaken appearance that experience raises teacher effectiveness. Selection bias could, however, also work in the opposite way as more able teachers with better opportunities to earn may be more likely to leave the profession.
Finally, Adeyemi (2008) argued that the importance of experienced teachers in schools has been highlighted by many researchers. They have also given different opinions about teaching experience and students’ learning outcomes in schools. Their arguments centre on the fact that experience improves teaching skills while pupils learn better at the hands of teachers who have taught them continuously over a period of years (Ijaiya, 2000). Considering the foregoing, the objective of this study is to examine teachers’ teaching experience in secondary schools and determine whether teaching experience had any relationship with students’ performance.
Teachers’ Attitude and Students’ Academic Performance
According to Abu and Gbadamasi (2014), in science education, attitude toward science is an important factor affecting students’ science achievement as well as students’ alternative conceptions or misconceptions. Attitude is a hypothetical construct that indicates an individual like and dislike towards an item. It may be positive, negative or neutral. Attitude is an approach, temperament, sensation, situation, etc. with regard to a person or thing: inclination or course, especially of the mind. Attitude is a way of looking at things (Muellerleile, 2005). An attitude may be defined as a predisposition to respond in a favorable or unfavorable manner with respect to a given attitude object (Oskamp& Schultz, 2005). Every science teacher considered the development of positive attitude towards science subjects as his center responsibility (Cheung, 2009).
According to Yara (2009), teacher’s attitude and his method of teaching can greatly influence the students. Bennett et al. (2001) also explored that the undergraduate students who had developed a lower constructive attitude towards chemistry almost always got low grade in examination. A common hypothesis with respect to teacher’s attitude and student achievement is that students taught using the right approach or attitude achieve at a higher level because their teachers have displayed the right attitude and acquired classroom management skills to deal with different types of classroom problems.