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This paper reports on part of a large-scale study aimed at examining students' perceptions of assessment. This paper will report on a study utilising mixed methodology in 150 Australian middle school classrooms. The purpose of the study described in this paper was to use the Students' Perceptions of Assessment Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (SPAQ) to identify and describe exemplary science teachers. With a sample of over 3000 science students, the reliability of the SPAQ scales ranged from 0.62 to 0.82. The exemplary teachers were identified as those whose students' perceptions were more than one standard deviation above the mean on three of the five scales of Congruence with planned learning, Transparency, Authenticity, Student consultation, and Diversity. The construct validity of the SPAQ to identify these exemplary teachers was confirmed through interviews with students and these views are reported in the article. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)

The purpose of this study was to examine interpersonal behavior in psychosocial learning environments and to determine the associations between science students' perceptions of their interactions with their teachers, the cultural background of teachers and their attitudinal outcomes. A sample of 1188 students completed the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction instrument. The responses to two subscales of Test of Science-related Attitudes were used as attitudinal measures. Significant associations between students' perceptions of teacher interpersonal behaviour and the cultural background of teachers were detected. The results showed that students perceived a more favourable interpersonal relationship with Western teachers in the secondary science classrooms. The students in the classes of Western teachers indicated that they enjoyed science lessons more than those in the classes of Asian teachers. Some implications for science instruction in this context are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because considerable prior research on open education has produced inconclusive or conflicting results, the present investigation was designed to overcome common weaknesses in past studies. A sample of 2175 students in 116 science classes provided their perceptions of actual and preferred classroom openness along five continuous dimensions (personalisation, participation, independence, investigation, differentiation) and responded to a cognitive and an affective outcome measure. Results replicated prior findings in that actual openness accounted for a significant amount of the variance in affective but not cognitive achievement. But actual‐preferred interactions also accounted for a substantial and significant amount of variance in both cognitive and affective outcomes. Findings supported the value of employing a person‐environment interactional framework in open education research, and suggested that actual‐preferred interaction could be at least as important as openness per se in predicting student outcomes in science classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]