Investigating a University Staff Development Project’s Success in Developing Beneficiaries

Description

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23470603

Clever Ndebele¹ and Anthony Kambi Masha² (Faculty of Educational Sciences, Walter Sisulu University, Mthatha, Eastern Cape, South Africa¹ and Faculty of Management and Public Administration Sciences, Walter Sisulu University, Mthatha, Eastern Cape, South Africa²)

This study investigated whether a staff development project (the merSETA Project) at a higher education institution in a rural setting in South Africa achieved its mandate to academically develop its beneficiaries. A quantitative approach was used, with a census sampling technique applied to beneficiaries of the merSETA Project. Data were collected using a closed-ended questionnaire covering four areas: accomplished needs, research skills attained, research capacity building, and the project’s overall benefit and management, and were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Findings show that beneficiaries rated the accomplishment of needs and the project’s overall management and benefits highly, while perceptions of the research skills attained were comparatively low. Hypothesis testing using SEM confirmed that most indicators across the accomplished-needs, research-skills, and benefit constructs were significant predictors of the project’s success in developing its beneficiaries, thereby rejecting the null hypothesis. The study concludes that the merSETA Project largely succeeded in its mandate to develop its beneficiaries academically, though gains in research skills were less consistent than gains in other areas. The study recommends a longitudinal design and a mixed-methods approach in future research to strengthen and extend these findings.