The relationship between teaching styles and student ratings of teaching was examined at a Chinese university. 388 teachers (170 men, 218 women) were invited to fill out the 49-item teaching Styles Inventory (Grogorenko & Sternberg, 1993). The inventory measures seven teaching styles: legislative, judicial, liberal, global, executive, conservative, and local. Scores from students' evaluations of teaching of course for one semester were collected. Students' evaluation scores were significantly and negatively related to executive and conservative teaching styles of their teachers, while insignificant correlation was found between student ratings and any of the other five teaching styles. Only conservative teaching style contributed significantly to the prediction of student ratings. Sex and age were found to have moderating effects on the relationship between teaching style and student ratings. The role of teaching styles in student ratings was discussed.
[Reproduced with permission of author(s) and publisher from: Chen, G. H. & Watkins, D. Can student ratings of teaching be predicted by teaching styles? Psychological Reports, 106(2), 501-512. © Psychological Reports 2010 Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://ammonsscientific.com/]

This essay explores the nature of the curriculum content of liberal studies--a core school subject in the new senior secondary curriculum in Hong Kong--with reference to the curriculum- making processes entailed in the formation of that subject. The central thesis is that a school subject is introduced to schools and classrooms as a distinct representation of content embodied in curriculum materials, entailing a theory of content--a special way of selecting, organizing, and framing the content for social, cultural, educational, curricular, and pedagogical purposes. Knowing the content of a school subject thus entails knowing more than the content per se; it entails an understanding of the underlying theory of content, which is necessary for disclosing and realizing the educational potential embodied in the content.
[Copyright of Journal of Curriculum Studies is the property of Routledge . Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220270902767311]