ESRA 2027 sessions by theme
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Educational Quality in Survey Research: One Construct, Multiple Perspectives? |
| Coordinator 1 | Professor Sylvia Rahn (Bergische Universität Wuppertal) |
| Coordinator 2 | Dr Kerstin Hoenig (German Institute for Adult Education - Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning (DIE)) |
Session Details
Assessing the quality of teaching and educational provision is a fundamental challenge across all sectors of the education system. In survey research, quality is commonly assessed through ratings by students or participants, teachers or educators, and, where available, external observers. Yet these perspectives do not necessarily converge, even when they refer to the same setting. Do such differences indicate measurement error, or do they reflect different and potentially valid facets of educational quality?
This session addresses this question along four lines:
• Convergence: To what extent do students, teachers, and external observers agree across dimensions of teaching and educational provision?
• Explanation: What accounts for systematic differences — do they reflect the distinct positions, experiences, and informational bases of the raters?
• Validity: Are ratings indicators of a perspective-independent "true" value, or can perspective-specific ratings be valid measures of different facets of the same construct?
• Application: What follows for the design and interpretation of survey instruments, feedback formats, evaluation, and quality development?
We are also interested in how AI is changing the cost-benefit relation of observational data on educational quality. Automated analysis of classroom video, audio, and text makes observational data cheaper to collect and code at scale, and it is beginning to blur the boundary between qualitative and quantitative evidence on teaching quality. Does machine coding constitute a further perspective in its own right, and how does it relate to human ratings?
We welcome contributions from all sectors of education, from primary schooling to adult and continuing education, and from any disciplinary or methodological tradition, including work drawing on one, two, or more perspectives, and work that brings new data sources or analytic approaches. The aim is to move beyond asking which perspective is most valid, toward asking which perspective — or combination of perspectives — is valid for which purpose.
