Issues in Identifying Student Perceptions of Teaching Quality

This paper reports on issues which cloud the validity and utility of quality of teaching information, and suggests a method to derive more information about aspects of teaching valued by students. A deconstructed form of a standardized rating questionnaire designed to measure student perceptions of teaching quality was responded to by students three times during a teaching semester. The results were compared with end of semester questionnaire responses, and these end of semester responses were also compared with those from previous cohorts of students. Quality of teaching feedback data indicated consistency of student attitudes across successive cohorts of students and throughout a semester’s tuition, and revealed student interpretations of general satisfaction items on quality of teaching surveys. Discussion of the results includes the possibility of a Hawthorne effect accounting for quality of teaching evaluation outcomes which may blunt the potential to discriminate across different aspects of quality of teaching. It is suggested that the deconstruction of items designed to measure satisfaction with quality of teaching provides a potentially rich source of feedback for teachers about student learning.