89 5 5.2.3 Characteristics of the school context School contexts differ with respect to the degree to which they promote the use of feedback data. A school organization that supports collaboration and feedback use among colleagues, that is, via professional learning communities (Brown & Poortman, 2018), might foster teachers’ use of feedback to improve their teaching. For example, if teachers are encouraged and supported by their colleagues to conduct thorough data analyses of student feedback data, they might be motivated to carry out improvement-oriented actions and to implement changes in their lessons, based on the feedback. School leaders can play an important role in creating such a school context, both by shaping a culture of professional learning in the school, and by introducing change initiatives (Hallinger, 2011; Hallinger & Heck, 2011). The school leader ideally also provides teachers with time, money and materials/instruments for collecting and using the data (Ikemoto & Marsh, 2007; Levin & Datnow, 2012). School leaders can also facilitate training and professional development activities aimed at improving teaching quality based on student feedback (Levin and Datnow (2012). 5.2.4 Data (system) characteristics Data (system) characteristics might also stimulate or hinder the use of student feedback to improve teaching. For example, if the feedback is hard for teachers to access, then how could a teacher even use the feedback about their lessons to improve their teaching (Schildkamp & Lai, 2013b)? Moreover, the feedback needs to provide valuable information on the quality of the teacher’s teaching, linked to those aspects of teaching quality that are effective for student learning. When using a digital data feedback system, as in the current study in which the Impact! tool was used to collect smartphone-assisted student feedback, there might be drawbacks to using technology for the collection of feedback, such as internet problems, the need for technology support, different types of devices, and student distraction when completing a digital questionnaire because of chats or social media applications (Obonyo et al., 2018; Seifert, 2018). 5.3 METHOD The teachers and students involved in this study all participated in the Impact! project, which investigated whether smartphone-assisted student feedback to teachers affects teaching quality (see Chapter 4 of this dissertation). Mathematics teachers in secondary schools used the Impact! tool for four
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY0ODMw