What Do Students Really Judge? IVET Teachers' Perspectives on Student Evaluation as a Source of Professional Assessment

Abstract

Student evaluation of teaching remains a widely used but theoretically contested institutional practice, with ongoing debate over whether student judgement can be interpreted as a valid indicator of teaching quality. This debate remains largely unexamined for teachers in initial vocational education and training, a professional category that, within the Italian regional vocational training system, lacks the standardised qualification pathways applicable to school-based teachers. Drawing on a capability-based theoretical framework, this study examined how vocational teachers position student evaluation within their broader understanding of professional assessment and proposed an alternative theoretical interpretation of student satisfaction data. Eighteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with vocational teachers employed by a regional training provider in north-eastern Italy, using thematic analysis with a critical-incident technique. Twelve interviews addressed student evaluation directly. Teachers accepted student judgement only conditionally — tied to track record, students' maturity, or explicit openness to unfavourable scores — while questioning its representativeness and its vulnerability to relational and episodic contamination. Procedural conditions of data collection, and opacity in how collected data were subsequently used, shaped whether student judgement was considered sincere and useful. Several teachers proposed outcome-based alternatives to direct opinion, while others grounded legitimacy in students' continuous presence during teaching. This legitimacy was concentrated in relational and contextual dimensions of practice rather than in technical competence. These findings offer a theoretically grounded account of student evaluation for an unregulated professional category, with practical implications for instrument design in comparable settings.