The Development of a Student Observation of Teachers Instrument for Use in High Schools

The Student Observation of Teachers and Teaching Techniques instrument (StOTT) was developed by high school students who served on the Student Advisory Board to the Pennsylvania Department of Education. The StOTT instrument consists of 32 items. Each of the first 29 is included in one of the subscales: Teacher-Student Relations, Grades and Testing, Materials, Teacher Personality, and Teaching Methods and Techniques. The final three items ask students to give their opinions about whether or not the teacher they are rating has any distracting personal mannerisms, to give the reason they took the teacher's course, and to tell whether they would recommend the course to another student. As reported in the Educational Quality Assessment manual (Hertzog, 1976) this instrument has evidenced an internal consistency reliability of .86. As evidences of validity significant correlations have been found with such variables as the number of books read by students, the number of days they were truant, and their desires to quit school (Masters, Shannon and Reardon, 1975). A copy of the Student Observation of Teachers test (version 2) is appended. (Author/MV)