20 The reliability and construct validity of student perceptions of teaching quality 2.1 INTRODUCTION In education, there has been an increasing demand for the evaluation of teaching quality for a variety of purposes (Centra, 2003; Darling-Hammond, 2000). The scores can be used for (scientific) research, for example, for investigating whether an intervention has had an effect on teaching quality (Goe et al., 2008; Muijs, 2006). The measurements can also serve as feedback to teachers, enabling the teacher to obtain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of a lesson or lessons (Fraser, 2007; Marzano & Toth, 2013). Based on this, customized professionalization activities can be used, to improve teaching quality and enhance student learning (Scheerens & Bosker, 1997; Seidel & Shavelson, 2007; Wang et al., 1993). Moreover, statements about the quality of the teacher’s instruction based on teaching quality scores can be used for management decisions (van der Lans & Maulana, 2018). Teaching quality can be measured in several ways. Lesson observations by external observers are quite common; however, multiple lessons should be observed and assessed by multiple raters to obtain a reliable picture of the quality of a teacher’s lessons (Hill et al., 2012; Praetorius et al., 2014). Another way to evaluate teaching quality is to analyse student achievement growth. Yet, it remains difficult to calculate the added value of a teacher using such an approach, because many external factors also influence students’ outcomes and information on students’ achievement growth does not provide teachers with tips for improving their lessons (Sammons et al., 1995; Timmermans et al., 2011). Teachers can also evaluate themselves, but according to Kruger and Dunning (1999), many people think of themselves as performing aboveaverage. Underperformers, in particular, vastly overestimate their performance, including underperforming teachers (Inspectorate, 2013). Teacher selfevaluations may thus be invalid measures of teaching quality (Muijs, 2006). Another way to evaluate teaching quality is to measure the perceptions of the target group, the students, about the quality of their teachers’ instruction (Coles, 2002; Kane & Staiger, 2012). Compared to the use of classroom observations to assess teaching quality, teaching quality can be assessed easily and eff iciently multiple times at one and the same time by means of student perceptions (equal to the number of students in a class; Kane & Staiger, 2012). Furthermore, as students are the only ones who observe a teacher daily, they are in some respects in a better position to make judgments about the teacher than an outside evaluator who visits the classroom only once or a few times (den Brok, Brekelmans, et al., 2006; Donahue, 1994; Korfhage, 1997)
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