Behavioral Changes in Teachers as a Function of Student Feedback: A Case for the Achievement Motivation Theory?

In a field experiment it was tested whether teachers change their behavior when they receive student ratings as feedback on their own behavior and on the behavior of a fictitious ideal teacher from the students' perspective. The researchers believed that theories of cognitive balance do not adequately explain such behavioral changes; therefore the Achievement Motivation Theory was used in the test. The student ratings referred to 14 modes of teacher behavior which, according to Berlyne's theory of epistimic curiosity, can be assumed to provoke curiosity behavior on the part of the students. Forty-four German language teachers, teaching seventh to tenth grades, were assigned randomly to the experimental and control groups. The major hypothesis, that the teachers in the experimental group would approximate their behavior more to the ideal behavior than the teachers in the control group, was tested by the interaction in a two way analysis of variance with repeated measures on one factor. The effectiveness of feedback on the behavioral changes in teachers was not estimated as especially high. The teachers in the control group changed for the worse, while the teachers in the experimental group improved only slightly as an average. It was assumed that the students did not perceive their teachers in a very "accentuated" way, so that teachers would have to change their behavior to a large degree before students perceived it. It was recommended that teachers should use the feedback technique in combination with other methods. (SK)