Students’ perceptions of instructional quality and learning achievement in everyday life: Do personality traits matter?

Students’ perceptions of instructional quality (SPIQ) are subjective and time-specific to some extent. Yet, they are mostly aggregated across students and assessed at one time point, neglecting student- and lesson-specific variance. The present study examined the role of students’ personality traits in state SPIQ and their relation to perceived lesson-specific learning achievement (i.e., self-reported comprehension). Thereby, we distinguished between idiosyncratic and consensual (classroom) SPIQ. We assessed the three basic dimensions of instructional quality, teacher support, cognitive activation, and classroom management, as state perceptions of all students within classrooms in mathematics’ instruction ( N observations = 2681) across three weeks of 372 German secondary school students’ ( M age = 15.3 years) daily life. Linear mixed effect models revealed (a) that students’ agreeableness and negative emotionality were positively and negatively, respectively, related to state SPIQ, (b) particularly pronounced positive relations between teacher support and perceived learning achievement, which were (c) stronger for lower levels in agreeableness. Differences across idiosyncratic and consensual perceptions could hardly be detected. Thus, the present study shed light on personality traits’ relations to SPIQ and within-student SPIQ–learning achievement associations, while demonstrating a new application for classroom-based state SPIQ that bridges the gap between intra- and intersubjective perceptions of instructional behavior.