Students’ conceptions of good teaching in three different disciplines

Abstract

This paper explores students’ conceptions of good teaching in three different disciplines. Moreover, the aim is to explore the relation between these conceptions and students’ approaches to learning by combining qualitative and quantitative methods. A total of 695 students from the Faculties of Behavioural Sciences, Law and Veterinary Medicine participated in the study. The students’ conceptions of good teaching were analysed using a qualitative content analysis. Furthermore, the students were assigned to homogenous subgroups on the basis of their responses to items measuring approaches to learning and the differences between these subgroups and the students’ conceptions were examined. The association between the conceptions, disciplines and approaches to learning were examined using Chi‐square tests. Twenty‐one dimensions were created from the data and 12 of them differed between the disciplines. Only one dimension differed between the student groups. The study suggests that there is disciplinary variation in students’ conceptions of good teaching and universities should take this into account in the development process of the student evaluation system.

Keywords:

• good teaching
• disciplinary variation
• approaches to learning
• student evaluation
• higher education

Acknowledgements

We gratefully thank Saara Repo‐Kaarento for her help in the content analysis and Erika Löfström for language consulting.