Who sees what? Conceptual considerations on the measurement of teaching quality from different perspectives

One puzzling finding in education research is that teachers, students, and external observers agree only marginally on their ratings of teaching quality. In this theoretical contribution, we summarize and reappraise previous findings on agreement between different raters of teaching quality. We explain these findings by thoroughly examining the instruments that have been used to measure teaching quality. Building on this, we propose a reference perspective matrix, which should be useful in explaining perspective-specific rating mechanisms behind responses to certain survey or Observation items. The reference perspective matrix could thus afford a theoretical foundation for future studies on the assessment of teaching quality.