Assessing Quality of Teaching from Different Perspectives: Measurement Invariance across Teachers and Classes

ABSTRACT

Comparing teachers’ self-assessment to classes’ assessment of quality of teaching can offer insights for educational research and be a valuable resource for teachers’ continuous professional development. However, the quality of teaching needs to be measured in the same way across perspectives for this comparison to be meaningful. We used data from 622 teachers self-assessing aspects of quality of teaching and of their classes (12229 students) assessing the same aspects. Perspectives were compared with measurement invariance analyses. Teachers and classes agreed on the average level of instructional clarity, and disagreed over teacher-student relationship and performance monitoring, suggesting that mean differences across perspectives may not be as consistent as the literature claims. Results showed a nonuniform measurement bias for only one item of instructional clarity, while measurement of the other aspects was directly comparable. We conclude the viability of comparing teachers’ and classes’ perspectives of aspects of quality of teaching.

Notes

¹ The true variance accounted for by the hierarchical structure of the data may be even higher, as it has been argued that, due to measurement error, ICCs based on the raw item scores are underestimations (Muthén, 1994).

² To ensure that the results were not biased by a discrepancy between models of different levels, we also compared the final model to a model in which all possible level 1 covariances were set free. This model was of the same structure as shown in Figure 1, with one difference: it did not assume latent variables on level 1, but allowed a free estimation of all possible covariances on level 1. Model fits only differed marginally, as did the parameter estimates.