64 Does smartphone-assisted student feedback affect the quality of teachers’ teaching? 4.1 INTRODUCTION Research shows that feedback can have a strong performance-enhancing effect (Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Ilgen et al., 1979; Kluger & DeNisi, 1996). In education, however, although teachers do receive immediate feedback during the lessons, teachers do not obtain much structured feedback on their functioning (Sawada et al., 2002; Sluijsmans & Kneyber, 2016; Voerman et al., 2012). One way for teachers to obtain feedback is through lesson observations (Lasagabaster & Sierrra, 2011), but reliable and valid observation scores about teaching quality require multiple observations and multiple, trained raters (Hill et al., 2012; Muijs, 2006). This makes lesson observations expensive and time-consuming. Another, more eff icient (less time-consuming, less expensive and faster) way to provide teachers with feedback is by measuring student perceptions of the teaching they have experienced during their teacher’s lesson(s) (Muijs, 2006; Peterson et al., 2000). If student perceptions are used, the number of observations (in cases where students evaluate the teaching of the teacher across many lessons) and observers (the number of students) is larger than in the case of lesson observations, which could improve the reliability of the scores (Fauth et al., 2014). In addition, student perceptions reflect the perspective of the target group (Kane & Staiger, 2012) and thereby promote student voice (Cook-Sather, 2002, 2007; Quaglia & Corso, 2017): the voice of students in their education (Lincoln, 1995). Teachers can use this feedback to improve the quality of their teaching. Despite these advantages of using student perceptions for obtaining feedback, several concerns remain. Students are not fully objective raters because they are closely involved in the lessons and they have their personal, subjective preferences (MacNell et al., 2015). Teachers’ scores may be biased, for example, because of the popularity of the teacher or students’ grades for a subject (Ferguson, 2012; van der Lans et al., 2015). Other concerns relate to discriminant validity (students’ ability to distinguish between different aspects of teaching) and the extent to which students’ ratings of a teacher correlate with teacher ratings by external observers (van der Lans, 2017). Although several studies have shown that student perceptions can provide reliable (Fauth et al., 2014; Kane & Staiger, 2012) and valid (Balch, 2012; Peterson et al., 2000; van der Scheer et al., 2019) information about teachers’ teaching, some publications have been more critical of the use of student perceptions (Cantrell & Kane, 2013). Technological developments make it possible for teachers to obtain feedback from students in an immediate and inexpensive way by means of a smartphone application. In this way, teachers can obtain feedback about one
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