A multilevel examination of Australian science student perceptions of their teachers

This large Australian study investigates which student, teacher and class characteristics are associated with students' perceptions of their teachers' interpersonal behaviour. The Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI) was used to examine two dimensions of teacher interpersonal behaviour: influence (dominance vs. submission) and proximity (cooperation vs. opposition). Earlier work with the QTI in the United States and the Netherlands had shown that several factors (such as gender, ethnic background, age, achievement, class size, and subject taught) exerted an effect on student perceptions of their teachers. These variables showed distinctive effects but these effects interact with each other when determining student perceptions. A meta-analysis was performed using QTI dimension score data to examine factors such as: gender, class size and subject. A hierarchical and multilevel analysis of variance (distinguishing between the school, class and student level) was conducted with ML3E software to investigate separate and combined effects of these variables. This presentation reports for the first time on the effect sizes and variance explained by these variables for a large Australian dataset and aims to provide some benchmark data for future studies