UCLA

Student surveys have gained prominence in recent years as a way to give students a voice in their learning process, and teacher self-reports have always been an effective instrument for revealing the planning, intentions, and expectations behind a given lesson. Though student and teacher surveys are widely used, extant research in education has primarily treated these ratings as separate sources of evidence. Little research in education has directly compared student and teacher reports or examined the potential predictive quality of teacher–student perceptual discrepancy. However, inconsistencies or “discrepancies” in perceptions across constructs has a rich history in organizational psychology and psychopathology.

Using similarly-worded student and teacher survey items from the Quality Assessment in Science (QAS) Surveys, this dissertation explores whether the degree and direction of perceptional congruence may be revealing of instructional practice and teaching quality. Two principal research topics were investigated:

1) What are the various methods one can use to measure discrepancy between student and teacher ratings within classrooms?

2) How do these different methods of examining discrepancy between student and teacher ratings perform for different purposes?

The first research question was investigated within classrooms, principally by computing “unstandardized differences in means” measuring perceptual discrepancy between students and teachers. These unstandardized differences in means were used in conjunction with other scoring measures and plots of student and teacher item responses to investigate whether perceptual discrepancy is greater for some classes and some instructional practices. The second research question was investigated by comparing how the discrepancy rankings of classrooms and instructional practices changed depending on the employed method of discrepancy.

Teaching is complex and, consequently, as many measures as possible should be used to capture its multidimensionality. Considering the views of students in tandem with the views of their teachers may allow teaching quality to be examined through a wider lens. That is, perceptual discrepancies may act as a barometer for the synchronous relationship or “intuneness” between students and teachers. The results of this dissertation suggest analyzing student and teacher perceptions together can help researchers better understand and differentiate quality practice, thereby providing constructive feedback to teachers.