42 Factors associated with differences in digitally measured student perceptions of teaching quality 3.1 INTRODUCTION Student perceptions of teaching quality have become increasingly prominent in teacher evaluations (e.g., Ferguson, 2012; Gärtner, 2014; van der Lans et al., 2015) The perspective of the target group in teaching, the students, can give valuable information about the quality of a lesson (Kane & Staiger, 2012), for example, for assessment, research, and improvement purposes (Mislevy, 2013). If the results are provided to teachers as feedback, teachers can obtain insights into the strengths and weaknesses of their lessons according to their students. They can use this feedback to improve their professional competences and the quality of their teaching (Fraser, 2007; Gärtner, 2014). Compared to other evaluation methods such as classroom observations, using student perceptions is an eff icient (less time-consuming and less expensive) way to collect information about teaching quality (Donahue, 1994; Fauth et al., 2014; Peterson et al., 2000). Moreover, modern technologies enable the eff icient processing of student perceptions of teaching quality. After collecting real-time digital survey feedback, teachers can immediately see the results in their web-based environment and can use this information to improve the quality of their future lessons. Such student ratings can be confounded by student, teacher, and classroom characteristics (den Brok, Bergen, et al., 2006; Levy et al., 1997); however, it is not yet clear to what extent such confounding variables are associated with student ratings collected using a real-time digital feedback tool. Differences between students in their ratings are not undesirable per se, because ratings do reflect a student’s personal perspectives on teaching quality, and students do differ (Kenny, 2004; Marsh, 2007). For instance, one cannot tell a low-performing girl in a classroom who is rating the quality of her teacher’s teaching that her ratings should actually be higher because they are influenced by her own level of performance or her gender. Although most potentially related factors at the student, teacher, and classroom levels are not malleable, knowing what factors are associated with differences in student perceptions of teaching quality might be helpful in interpreting student ratings, for example, by researchers (when they study the effects of educational interventions by means of student perceptions of teaching quality), by supervisors and school leaders (if they need to make high- or low-stakes personnel decisions), and by teachers (when using the student ratings for teacher reflection and development). Moreover, research on the correlations between student perceptions of teaching quality and student background characteristics (e.g., their level of performance) could give insight
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