As pressure builds to assess students, teachers, and schools, educational practitioners and policy makers are increasingly looking toward student perception surveys as a promising means to collect high-quality, useful data. For instance, the widely cited Measures of Effective Teaching study lists student perception surveys as one of the three key…

Search the Internet for the qualities of a good teacher and you'll find that an entire range of ideas are offered. Having spent half a working life as a science teacher and the remainder as a science education consultant (and, for a period, an Ofsted team inspector!), the author would like to attempt to tease out what makes a "good science…