Student-teachers’ verbal communication patterns during their teaching practice in ‘Studies for the Environment’ subject in early Greek primary classes

This study explores the quality of student–teachers’ (STs’) verbal communication during their teaching practice on the ‘Studies for the Environment’ subject, and identifies potential factors affecting it. Forty-one teaching sessions were analysed revealing that STs dominate classroom talking by having almost an equal number of utterances with their students. Moreover, only about one-third of STs’ sentences are questions, with the majority of them being factual (38%), while probing (18%), higher order (18%) or divergent (6%) questions were much less frequent. In addition, although teaching sessions were addressed to very young children (6–9 years old), only a minor percentage of questions were stimulating their emotions (5%). STs’ questioning seems to be independent from the class size, grade level and topic of instruction, while STs’ expressed utterances are significantly higher in smaller classes. A classroom verbal communication pattern was also developed from the available data; however, it is confined within the Greek context.     

Teaching Effectiveness: The relationship between reaction and learning evaluation criteria

This study used a pre/post design to assess student learning for the purposes of examining relationships among student grades, student learning, and student evaluations of teaching. These relationships were reframed in terms of reaction (Level I) and learning (Level II) evaluation criteria. Participants were 652 undergraduate students enrolled in seven sections of an introductory psychology course. Our results indicated a medium relationship between student grades and the pre/post learning measure. In addition, a small relationship was observed between student ratings of teaching effectiveness and a pre/post measure of learning. We conclude that student ratings and learning measures assess different aspects of teaching effectiveness and should not be used interchangeably. The most appropriate criterion for assessing teaching effectiveness is a function of the goal of evaluation. However, reaction and learning measures may be used in conjunction to obtain a more complete picture of instructor effectiveness.