111 6 Student engagement refers to the degree of attention and interest that students show when they are learning or being taught, which extends to the level of motivation they have to learn and progress in their education. It might thus be interesting to investigate student engagement in a student feedback study as well, because if student engagement in their lessons increases when they give feedback to their teacher about the quality of the lesson, this might positively impact their learning motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2002). Further investigation of the validity of student perceptions of teaching quality could be done by relating students’ ratings of teaching quality to students’ achievement growth scores. In this way, it can be determined whether classes/students who rate their teachers higher for the quality of their teaching also have better learning outcomes than classes/students who rate the quality of their teacher’s instruction less positively. As research on the predictive validity of student perceptions of teaching quality is rather scarce, this would be a valuable contribution to the existing research on this topic. Lastly, with regard to future research on the validity of student perceptions of teaching quality, it might be interesting to combine students’ ratings with other teaching quality measurements, such as classroom observations by external observers, interviews with teachers, or teachers’ self-evaluations. From previous research, we know that separate teaching quality ratings from students, teachers and observers do not strongly correlate (de Jong & Westerhof, 2001; Dobbelaer et al., submitted). However, combining different teaching quality measures might particularly be interesting for improving the validity of the measurements, because some aspects of teaching quality may be assessed more validly by using a specif ic method and others more validly by using another method. For example, it might be very diff icult for students to assess the extent to which the teacher explained subject-matter content correctly. Students can judge whether the teacher’s instruction was clear to them, but not whether the subject matter was presented without error, or whether the teacher followed professional standards for explaining subject matter. A trained, external observer judges this better. In contrast, it is hard for external observers to assess how students experience instruction in the classroom, for example, whether a teacher’s instruction was really clear to all students, or whether students felt safe in the classroom and felt that the teacher had high expectations of them. Students can tell this well. Moreover, with classroom observations and student perceptions, you cannot capture the teacher’s intentions and (deliberate) considerations during the lesson. For example, a teacher may consciously choose to give a particular student extra
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