106 Conclusion and discussion of the findings and implications for educational practice and for future research than researchers do, and therefore they represent a valuable perspective on the quality of teaching. Especially because they represent the perspective of “the customer” (the students in class), student perceptions of teaching quality can be valuable sources of information for all kind of purposes (e.g., research, feedback, improvement). However, taking the results of our study on validity into account, a nuanced and careful interpretation of student ratings of teaching quality by teachers, school leaders and researchers is required (Fisher et al., 2006). This is highly dependent on the purposes for the measurements. For example, if student teaching quality ratings are used by school leaders for personnel evaluations, and a teacher’s evaluation results based on student perceptions are low, it is important to be aware of the fact that the low scores can have various causes. It might be that there are many low-performing students in class, or that the teacher has little teaching experience. So, whatever the reason for collecting student perceptions of teaching quality, being aware of the subjective nature of student perceptions of teaching quality is required, to carefully interpret students’ ratings. In our studies, we used student perceptions of teaching quality as feedback for teachers to improve their lessons. This brings us to the question of what impact students’ teaching quality ratings can have on teaching: does student feedback on teaching quality lead to better teaching quality? In section 6.3, we will discuss this topic in more depth. 6.3 THE IMPACT OF STUDENT FEEDBACK ON TEACHING QUALITY From the findings of our third study (chapter 4 of this dissertation), we know that, although teachers gained insight into where there was room for improvement in their lessons, based on the student feedback they received, and although they reported that they took improvement-oriented actions, they did not reflect significantly more on their lessons in response to the feedback and they did not improve the quality of their teaching sustainably (according to their students). How could that happen? Several explanations were given in chapter 4 and 5. One potential explanation is that improvement can only occur if teachers are strongly motivated to improve. Such teachers search for their weaknesses, dare to step out of their comfort zone and also dare to make changes to their teaching, for example, based on what is known to be effective for student
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