57 3 3.5 DISCUSSION In the following, the results for both the variables found to be related to student perceptions of teaching quality and the unrelated factors are discussed. Thereafter, implications of the findings for practice, some limitations of the study, and suggestions for further research are presented. 3.5.1 Related factors Differences between students in their ratings of teaching quality are not undesirable per se, because ratings reflect students’ personal perspectives on teaching quality and students do differ. However, we do not want student ratings of teaching quality to be biased. As far as the four factors that were found to be linked with differences in students’ ratings of teaching quality are concerned, the reasons for this relationship are unknown. For example, highperforming students might understand their teachers’ explanations of subject matter very well. In that case, their teachers meet the needs of those students well, which might be interpreted as an indication of better quality teaching. However, the positive ratings might also be caused by the fact these students are brighter than the other students, and understand the explanations even if the teacher does not explain things that well. As far as teachers’ likeability and its relationship with student ratings is concerned, we do not know whether more likeable teachers also actually teach better, or whether they receive higher teaching quality ratings because they are nice, funny, and so forth, but do not actually teach better than other teachers. Moreover, we know from the literature on child and developmental psychology and neuroscience that children learn better if they feel safe, are not anxious, and have trustworthy relationships with the teacher (Ellis et al., 2006; Willis, 2010). The Maslow-type (Maslow, 1962, 1970) translation for this would be that the “likeable” quality is likely a catch-all proxy for students’ psychological feelings of safety with their teacher, and so students feel that they can learn better from likeable teachers. In fact, brain science shows us that their feelings do have positive impacts on their learning uptake (Willis, 2010). Furthermore, are more experienced teachers really better teachers as a result of their experience, and is this reflected by student ratings of teaching quality? By the same token, it was found that the higher the average mathematics grade for the class, the higher students rated the quality of their teachers’ instruction. Is the average mathematics grade of a class higher because the teachers are good teachers and thus rated high by their students,
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY0ODMw