91 5 could not be interviewed for physical reasons. Therefore, the final sample included eight teachers and 21 students. An overview of the participants and their background characteristics can be found in Table 5.1. 5.3.2 Sample comparative case study A teacher who improved her teaching most of all based on the digital student feedback (positive-effect teacher) and a teacher whose teaching got worse rather than better (negative-effect teacher) were the extreme cases in terms of the degree of teaching quality improvement (based on a relative increase or decrease in teaching quality score from pretest to posttest; see next section about the Impact! tool and Table 1 for the teaching quality difference scores). The positive-effect teacher (teacher LKR02) was given the pseudonym Rachel, and was a 37-year-old woman who had worked as a secondary school teacher for 10 years. She used the Impact! tool 13 times during the research period of 4 months. The negative-effect teacher (teacher LKR03) was given the pseudonym Mike, and was a 30-year-old man. He had worked as a secondary school teacher for 6 years and used the Impact! tool five times during the same research period. Rachel and Mike both completed the same teacher training program to become mathematics teachers. During the research period, Rachel studied for her master’s degree in Educational Sciences. 5.3.3 The Impact! tool The quality of teachers’ teaching was measured at pretest and posttest by means of students’ responses to a paper-based questionnaire collecting their perceptions (see chapter 4 for a description of the intervention). The statements about teaching quality were the items taken from the questionnaire used in the digital Impact! tool that measure the degree to which a lesson that has just ended matches the following characteristics of effective lessons: a supportive and positive classroom climate, well-organized and well-structured classroom management, clear instruction, adaptive instruction, high-quality teacher– student interaction, cognitive activation of students, and formative assessment. Fifteen statements about the teacher’s behaviour in class (e.g., “The teacher clearly indicated what I was going to learn” and “The teacher explained the subject-matter in such a way that I understood it well”) were scored by students using a 4-point Likert scale (1 = totally disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = agree, 4 = totally agree). The differences between the pretest and posttest scores (all students in the class) for the eight participating teachers are given in Table 5.1.
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