Implications for evaluation from a study of students' perceptions of good and poor teaching

Many standard teaching evaluation questionnaires havebeen criticised as being based upon didactic models ofteaching, and there are also concerns about extraneousfactors biasing responses. These issues are examinedin the light of a study of students' perceptions ofgood and poor teaching from interviews with 55 HongKong undergraduate university students. The interviewtranscripts suggested that perceptions of teachingquality form as an interplay between the student'sconceptions of learning and the beliefs about teachingof the lecturer. The students' beliefs about learningcan be placed on a continuum between passive andactive learning. Their perception of the instructors'beliefs about teaching range between transmissive andnon-traditional teaching. The quality of teaching isthen conceived in four categories which are thequadrants formed by the intersections of therepresentations of beliefs about learning andperceptions of teaching. The quadrants are examined inturn to reveal how students with active and passivebeliefs about learning conceive quality intransmissive and non-traditional teaching. The resultssuggest that responses to questionnaires would bebiased by the students' conceptions of learning. Theyalso confirm the significance of implicit models ofteaching in questionnaire design.