Approaches to Teaching and Students’ Perceptions of Teaching

Abstract

These pages report an empirical study that matches teachers’ approaches toteaching with students’ perception of good teaching. The teachers’ approaches toteaching are derived from a survey of teachers in a major faculty using thequestionnaire developed by Prosser and Trigwell, while the students’ perceptions ofgood teaching are taken from the Course Experience Questionnaire, a nationalinstrument used in Australia to assess degree programs. On the one hand the unit ofanalysis is the department and on the other it is the field of study. Care was taken torelate the two. Among the findings are (1) departments do have distinctiveapproaches which students perceive, (2) approaches to teaching are not related toany obvious demographic characteristics of respondents like rank or experience, and(3) the major scales of Information Transfer and Teacher Focused versus ConceptualChange and Students Focused are vindicated. Overall, students’ perceptions ofteaching are related to the evaluation they make of degree programs.