A research agenda on heterogeneity in students’ perceptions of teaching quality

8th February 2021 : 12:45 - 14:00

Please register ahead of the webinar, at this link.

Students in the same class who rate the quality of the same teacher’s instruction can vary greatly in their perceptions. However, this heterogeneity in students’ perceptions of teaching quality has often been disregarded in prior studies or treated as “noise”. In my research program, I argue that a better understanding of heterogeneous perceptions of students within classes and their drivers would not only allow to better understand the properties of the aggregated class mean commonly used in multi-level models, but also hold pervasive implications for educational practice (e.g., the same teacher’s instruction might not be equally adaptive for all students or types of students, depending on students’ specific characteristics). The studies that I will present in this talk focus (a) on potential sources of heterogeneity in students’ perceptions of teaching quality, such as teacher characteristics and behavior, individual student characteristics, and social classroom processes, as well as (b) on implications of heterogeneity for students’ learning.  Moreover, I will discuss different methodological approaches to study heterogeneity in students’ perceptions and outline promising inter-disciplinary future directions.