What do undergraduate students understand by excellent teaching?

This article explores undergraduate students’ conceptions of what constitutes excellent teaching. The analysis of semi-structured interviews with students at two English universities yields five qualitatively different conceptions of excellent teaching. In contrast to the current intense policy focus on outcome factors (e.g., graduate employability), students predominantly discern process factors as conducive to excellent teaching: how the subject matter is presented, what the lecturer brings to the teaching process, how students’ personal understanding is supported, and to what extent the questioning and transformation of disciplinary knowledge is facilitated. More importantly, this study demonstrates that an expansion of students’ awareness of the nature of teaching is internally related to the expansion of their awareness of the nature of disciplinary knowledge