Context in research on teaching quality: bringing a complex idea into the spotlight

Abstract

This article analyzes how teaching effectiveness research deals with context when investigating teaching quality. It examines three categories of variables that are often treated as context: classroom composition, content, and country. An in-depth analysis of the literature on teaching quality where these variables are treated as context suggests that context can have an effect on the empirical findings of teaching-quality research and that this could be an explanation for why results are often inconsistent. Analyzing the explicit and implicit conceptual assumptions about the relation between context and teaching quality in empirical studies revealed that classroom composition and content are often not considered essential to teaching quality, and that it is generally assumed that measures of teaching quality are internationally valid. The paper ends by discussing how future studies might approach the issue of context so that consistency in research on teaching quality is improved.