Prioritizing of Criteria in Teacher-Candidate Selection Process by Analytic Hierarchy Process

Abstract

This paper reviews and identifies the criteria used in the teacher-candidate selection process. The identified main criteria and sub-criteria were prioritized according to their importance by a group of experts. The literature was the source of the criteria and twelve experts who have experience in teacher-selection process were asked to justify the criteria obtained from the secondary source. Furthermore, these experts evaluated the relative importance of the identified criteria in a pair-wise manner. Their judgments were analysed by a multi-criteria method, known as the Analytic Hierarchy Process.   Three main criteria were identified which consisted of ‘content of knowledge’, ‘communication skills’ and ‘personality’, while each of these three main criteria had four, six and eight sub-criteria respectively. The degree of importance which is known as weights of these criteria were also calculated where those criteria which receive higher values are considered to be more important. Generally, the results of the analysis show that ‘communication skills’ and ‘personality’ are the most and second-most important criteria respectively, followed by ‘content of knowledge’ in the third position. The analysis of the importance of the sub-criteria of these three main criteria is also included.   These criteria and the weights can be used later in the development of the teacher-selection model. Both secondary data and primary data were used in this research. All the experts or the respondents have experience in the selection process where 40% of them have more than six years’ experience.   Keywords: Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), importance, multi-criteria, selection, teacher, weights.