Quality of teaching - teachers' and students' perspectives

Abstract

Efficiency, effectiveness and quality of educational institutions in Serbia are assessed through evaluation and self-evaluation based on the key areas set out in the Standards for the evaluation of the higher education institutions. Starting from the statement of Albert Einstein that "teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty", authors have developed a range of instruments and, among other things, examine the area of quality of teaching through the process of self-evaluation in Preschool Teacher Training College in Kikinda, Serbia. In this study is presented the research on the quality of educational process in Preschool Teacher Training College in Kikinda in Serbia, conducted in 2013 in which participated 177 students and 20 teachers. The main research focus: quality of educational process has been observed trough two additional aspects that are inseparable from the quality of teaching: grading system and learning effects. The research instrument is conceptualized on the basis of questionnaire that measure students' and teachers' perspectives on the quality of teaching, as two main groups in teaching process, with 11 items and five point Likert scale of answers. Questionnaires are distributed in two separate forms: for students and for teachers, with the aim of making the same content on the quality of teaching adaptable and comprehensible to two groups of examinees. The aim of this study is to explore do, and if so, how the students' and teachers' perspectives on the quality of teaching differ. The results show that there are differences in perspectives among students and teachers. Teachers evaluate the quality of teaching slightly higher than students. On the basis of these results, authors examine how the attitudes of academics and students about quality of teaching might offer a way of analyzing the relations between disciplinary knowledge practices and teaching learning interactions. For the purpose of analyzing the research results, authors adjusted Guskey's model of five critical levels of professional development evaluation. The reason why we decide to use those methods is understanding of quality of teaching from systemic model of learning which emphasizes that what students learn and how teachers teach is part of a system, which is itself constrained by the subject discipline, the institution and ultimately by the government agenda.