Adult students’ perceptions of good teaching as a function of their conceptions of learning—Part 2. Implications for the evaluation of teaching

Students in part-time courses were interviewed about their perceptions of good teaching and tutoring. The perceptions differed markedly between those with reproductive conceptions of learning and students holding self-determining ones. The former preferred didactic teaching but disliked interaction, whereas the latter had almost diametrically opposite perspectives by finding student-centred approaches consistent with their conceptions of learning. The findings have implications for the evaluation of teaching, as ratings are likely to be influenced by the predominant conceptions of learning of a class. It is common for individual instructors to be regularly evaluated by teacher evaluation questionnaires, which often have a teacher-centred bias, and for the ratings to be used for appraisal. It is argued that this leads to conservatism as teachers fear that students with reproductive conceptions of learning will reduce their ratings if they innovate in their teaching. As the degree of bias from this ratings-lowering phenomenon may be quite large, the findings are a caution against the common practice of using absolute rating values from both teacher evaluation questionnaires and programme-level evaluation by instruments such as the Course Experience Questionnaire. Results need to be interpreted together with other evidence and take into account contextual factors including students' conceptions of learning.