Francis Xavier Lubega^1,, Gyaviira Musoke Genza², Jessica Norah Aguti³

The difficulty of finding an appropriate teacher reward system which can sustainably promote quality education prompted the study from which this article arises. This article focuses on two objectives: i) to examine the relationship between prevalent school-level teacher reward practices and students’ academic performance and ii) to examine the relationship between prevalent school-level teacher reward practices and teachers’ ratings of students’ academic performance. Hinged on the philosophical paradigm of pragmatism, the study was conducted in 23 secondary schools through a cross-sectional concurrent mixed methods research design, over a sample of 368 participants, using stratified random and purposive sampling. Data collected using questionnaires, interviews and documentary review was analysed using themes, frequency distribution, and Chi-square test of independence. The study discovered that the practices of involving teachers in reward-related decision making and espousing performance-based reward programs as well as making effort to achieve attractive salaries promise to support teacher-facilitated learning. It was then concluded that improved remuneration mainly in form of higher and more prompt salaries as well as greater participation of teachers especially in the management of school-level reward-for-performance schemes can more effectively promote quality teaching leading to students’ gains in learning achievement. It was therefore recommended that reward managers at school level should cherish practices which, on the one hand, enable teachers to receive competitive and more prompt remuneration and, on the other hand, attach special value to teachers’ direct or representative participation in major decision making at least concerning merit-based rewards.

teachers, students, reward practices, teacher motivation, academic achievement, performance