In spring 2020, school closures were enacted to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Students and teachers faced the challenge of organizing digital teaching and learning without sufficient time to prepare. In this study, we investigated how teachers implemented teaching from a distance and how these different implementations were associated with students’ and parents’ perceptions of teaching quality and students’ social involvement, enjoyment of learning, academic effort, and perceived competence. To this end, we examined data from 277 teachers, 3,159 students in Grades 5 to 10, and 1,688 parents who rated classes in mathematics, German language arts, and English as a foreign language during the school closures. The results showed that teachers’ implementations of distance teaching varied greatly. Teaching methods enabling social connectedness (e.g., video meetings, learning videos created by the teacher) revealed the most consistent positive associations with students’ and parents’ teaching quality ratings and students’ learning experiences.

According to dimensional comparison theory (DCT), students evaluate their ability in one domain (e.g., math) by comparing their achievement in that domain with their achievement in other domains (e.g., English). Primarily in research on students' academic self-concept, these comparison processes have been found to lead to positive associations within subjects (e.g., the better the student's achievement in math, the higher that student's math self-concept) but negative associations between subjects (e.g., better skills in math than in English lead to a relatively lower self-concept in English than in math; Möller & Marsh, 2013). However, less is known about dimensional comparison effects in evaluations of others, for example, students' ratings of their teachers. In the present study, we used data from a large-scale assessment of teaching quality in Germany (N ϭ 6,479 students from 401 classes in Grades 5 to 10) and examined the associations between students' grades and their teaching-quality ratings in mathematics and German language classes. In line with DCT, the results revealed positive within-subject associations and negative between-subjects associations: Most importantly, dimensional comparison effects were also found at the classroom level and remained stable even after achievement test scores were controlled for. Educational Impact and Implications StatementStudent ratings are frequently used in assessments of teaching quality and evaluations of teachers and institutions in schools and higher education. At the same time, the use of student ratings is also approached with some caution because student ratings might function differently from ratings made by adult observers. In the present study, we examined students' ratings of teaching quality in two subjects (mathematics and the German language) in a sample of 6,749 students in Grades 5 to 10 and investigated the extent to which student grades are associated with their teaching-quality ratings in the same subject but also associated with students' ratings of another subject. Our findings showed that the better a student's grade in one subject-area course, the better he or she rated the quality of the teaching in that same course. Additionally, the better the student's grade in one subject-area course, the relatively lower he or she rated the quality of the teaching in the other subject-area course. That is, student ratings of one subject are impacted by grades they receive in another subject. This phenomenon should especially be taken into account when using student ratings for teacher evaluations.

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