Abstract
In educational research, characteristics of the learning environment are generally assessed by asking students to evaluate features of their lessons. The student ratings produced by this simple and efficient research strategy can be analysed from two different perspectives. At the individual level, they represent the individual student’s perception of the learning environment. Scores aggregated to the classroom level reflect perceptions of the shared learning environment, corrected for individual idiosyncrasies. This second approach is often pursued in studies on teaching quality and effectiveness, where student-level ratings are aggregated to the class level to obtain general information about the learning environment. Although this strategy is widely applied in educational research, neither the reliability of aggregated student ratings nor the within-group agreement between the students in a class has been subject to much investigation. The present study introduces and discusses different procedures that have been proposed in the field of organisational psychology to assess the reliability and agreement of students’ ratings of their instruction. The application of the proposed indexes is demonstrated by a reanalysis of student ratings of mathematics instruction obtained in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (N = 2,064 students in 100 classes).
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The literature on observer agreement also refers to the ICC(1) as the unadjusted intraclass correlation, because mean differences between raters affect the error variance, meaning that absolute agreement between the raters is required (McGraw & Wong, 1996). In organisational psychology (e.g. Bliese, 2000; Cohen et al., 2001), in contrast, the ICC(1) is seen as a measure of reliability. This is the approach taken in the present article.
In their original article, James et al. (1984) presented the r WG as a measure of interrater reliability among ratings of a single target. Following critical analysis by Schmidt and Hunter (1989), it became standard practice to see the r WG as a measure of interrater agreement (James et al., 1993; Kozlowski & Hattrup, 1992). The main criticism voiced by Schmidt and Hunter was that, in psychometric testing theory, the concept of reliability is based on the assumption of variance between true values, but that this variance is only given when more than one stimulus is rated.
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Lüdtke, O., Trautwein, U., Kunter, M. et al. Reliability and agreement of student ratings of the classroom environment: A reanalysis of TIMSS data. Learning Environ Res 9, 215–230 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10984-006-9014-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10984-006-9014-8