Pupils’ views of management

Relatively little research into teaching has solicited pupils’ views. Yet they will spend several thousand hours sitting in primary school classes, and the German social psychologist Kurt Lewin (1943) claimed that children as young as 3 or 4 could be even more sensitive than adults to certain situations. One early survey of 672 studies of teacher effectiveness by Domas and Tiedeman (1950) reported that only seven of these had used some form of pupil rating. Only in higher education, particularly in the United States, has the student’s evaluation been given any prominence (Marsh 1985).