Mapping Students' Perceptions of Interesting Class Lessons

Abstract

Students' perspectives about their experiences as students are potentially valuable resources for teachers and researchers. In this study middle-school students were asked, ‘What are the features of interesting class lessons?’ Students' responses were allocated to categories of similar semantic meaning and representative statements were selected from each category. The students then sorted and ranked the representative statements, generating numerical data suitable for cluster anal-ysis and multidimensional scaling. The cluster analysis generated three main clusters: (a) teachers, (b) individual learning, and (c) social learning. Each main cluster contained smaller clusters that indicated students' concern with issues such as the personal qualities of teachers and self-efficacy. The multidimensional scaling analysis generated a perceptual map that was interpreted to contain two dimensions: (d) student-teacher and (e) individual-social learning. The structure of the perceptual map stimulates questions about the connections that students might make between students' learning and teachers' teaching strategies, as well as students' understandings about the learning opportunities provided by social learning activities.