Teaching Quality in Math Class: The Development of a Scale and the Analysis of Its Relationship with Engagement and Achievement

Abstract

Math achievement and engagement declines in secondary education; therefore, educators are faced with the challenge of engaging students to avoid school failure. Within self-determination theory, we address the need to assess comprehensively student perceptions of teaching quality that predict engagement and achievement. In study one we tested, in a sample of 548 high school students, a preliminary version of a scale to assess nine factors: teaching for relevance, acknowledge negative feelings, participation encouragement, controlling language, optimal challenge, focus on the process, class structure, positive feedback, and caring. In the second study, we analyzed the scale’s reliability and validity in a sample of 1555 high school students. The scale showed evidence of reliability, and with regard to criterion validity, at the classroom level, teaching quality was a predictor of behavioral engagement, and higher grades were observed in classes where students, as a whole, displayed more behavioral engagement. At the within level, behavioral engagement was associated with achievement. We not only provide a reliable and valid method to assess teaching quality, but also a method to design interventions, these could be designed based on the scale items to encourage students to persist and display more engagement on school duties, which in turn bolsters student achievement.

Teaching Quality: Relationships between Students’ Motivation, Effort Regulation, Future Interest, and Connection Frequency

“…Within Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 1985, a positive teaching quality refers to teachers' behaviors that support students' needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. More specifically, autonomy refers to the feeling of performing an activity without external pressures, students feeling that school actions emanate from their self and that academic activities are consistent with their own interests (León et al, 2017;Wang & Eccles, 2013). Competence refers to the sense of interacting effectively with the environment, and to the students' belief of successfully achieve at school activities and learning tasks (León et al, 2017;Ng et al, 2011).…”

“…More specifically, autonomy refers to the feeling of performing an activity without external pressures, students feeling that school actions emanate from their self and that academic activities are consistent with their own interests (León et al, 2017;Wang & Eccles, 2013). Competence refers to the sense of interacting effectively with the environment, and to the students' belief of successfully achieve at school activities and learning tasks (León et al, 2017;Ng et al, 2011). Lastly, relatedness alludes to the need to build and maintain positive and meaningful relationships.…”

“…Based upon this previous literature, from which different authors have focused separately on specific items to support students' autonomy, competence, or relatedness, León et al (2017) developed a global approach under the label teaching quality. The authors developed and validated a scale to assess students' perceptions of those specific teachers' behaviors during class, grouped in nine factors under the label teaching quality.…”

“…The authors developed and validated a scale to assess students' perceptions of those specific teachers' behaviors during class, grouped in nine factors under the label teaching quality. These factors, shown in Table 1, allow capturing specific and well-defined teachers' behaviors that are amenable to intervention and improvement (León et al, 2017).…”

The impact of teaching quality and learning time on primary EFL learners’receptive proficiency

“…Focusing on the quality of school teaching (also referred to as lesson quality, instructional quality, etc. ; see Leon, Medina-Garrido, & Núñez, 2017) a number of principles of good teaching -such as learner-orientation (e.g. Brophy, 1999) -have been described, very often subsumed in lists of ten or so criteria (for an overview see e.g.…”