The development of an instrument for assessing students’ perceptions of teachers’ knowledge

The purpose of this study was to describe the development and validation of an instrument on Student Perceptions of Teachers’ Knowledge (SPOTK) in relation to their pedagogy. Features of teachers’ knowledge from the research literature related to instruction, representation, subject matter knowledge, and knowledge of how to assess students’ understanding were used to generate categories in the SPOTK. The result of a pilot study with 634 Taiwanese junior high school students showed high reliability of the scales, a good factor structure, and provided suggestions to delete weak items. In the main study, for which nine to ten items under each category were generated making a total of 37 items in the SPOTK, the instrument was administered to 1879 Taiwanese and 1081 Australian junior high school students varying in grades, sex and ability levels. Reliability and validity measures of the instrument were established based on Cron bach alpha and factor analysis. After the validating process, 28 items remained in the final instrument and reliabilities of the scales ranged from 0.97 to 0.82. Comment is made about the differences between Australian and Taiwanese students’ responses and suggestions for using the instrument in future research.