Measuring instructional quality in mathematics education

Instructional research has recently become more important within the framework of teaching effectiveness research. Various instruments have been developed within this research discipline in order to gain a better insight of what is really happening in the classroom. Most of these instruments mainly focus on generic aspects of instructional quality. In this paper we first describe a subject-specific dimension of instructional quality. Second, we show how these subject-specific aspects could be measured empirically with a standardized observational instrument. The results point out both good interrater agreement and satisfying reliability measures. The presented observational instrument has been developed within the study TEDS-instruct in which relations to teachers' competencies and students' achievement are analyzed.