Schoolchildren in Ecuador Rate Their Student Teachers in Landmark Voice Study

For decades, researchers evaluating teacher training placements have asked everyone except the people who sit in the classroom every day: the pupils themselves. A new study from Ecuador has now changed that, collecting nearly 2,500 evaluations from more than 1,100 schoolchildren about the student teachers working in their classrooms, and the results reveal both overwhelming enthusiasm and a subtle methodological trap that anyone gathering children’s opinions needs to know about.

The research, conducted at the Universidad Nacional de Educación (UNAE), a public university specializing in teacher education, drew on 2,453 valid evaluations completed by 1,140 pupils across 123 classrooms in 38 host schools in the southern highland provinces of Azuay and Cañar. Unlike most teacher education programs, where placements are brief or concentrated in the final year, UNAE distributes its practicum throughout the degree, with student teachers attending host classrooms one to three times per week from the first semesters. That sustained presence turned pupils into regular participants in the practicum, and the research team wanted to know what they actually thought of it.

The findings, published in Frontiers in Education, are striking in their consistency. Between 91.5 and 98.5 percent of pupils gave favorable ratings on seven of the eight survey items. Among the youngest children, from early childhood education through third grade, 97.0 percent said they enjoyed the class, 97.0 percent felt comfortable with the student teachers’ presence, and 98.5 percent wanted them to return. Among older pupils, from fourth grade onward, 96.7 percent reported feeling content with the student teachers, 94.7 percent said they had learned something new from them, 94.0 percent judged the classroom resources effective or very effective, and 91.5 percent rated the influence on their own learning as positive or very positive.

One dimension stood out as less rosy. Only 69.6 percent of older pupils said they always felt comfortable asking the student teachers for help, while 28.1 percent felt comfortable only sometimes and 2.3 percent said never. This comfort in seeking help, which the authors link to a well-documented association between the affective quality of teacher-student relationships and pupil engagement, appears to be the least consolidated aspect of the relationship. Notably, it improved across successive weekly evaluations, suggesting that the relational side of the practicum develops gradually as student teachers spend more time in a classroom.

But the study’s most consequential contribution may be methodological. The researchers administered the questionnaires through a mobile application, sometimes via the student teachers themselves and sometimes via project staff hired specifically for data collection. When the same pupils were evaluated under both conditions, a clear pattern emerged: ratings collected by project staff were lower than those collected by student teachers, particularly for the items that touched most directly on the relationship. Among 54 older pupils evaluated under both conditions, the share of evaluations in which they always felt comfortable asking for help fell from 85.2 percent when a student teacher administered the survey to 68.5 percent when project staff did. The perceived positive influence on learning dropped from 96.3 percent to 86.1 percent.

This administrator effect is a textbook demonstration of social desirability bias in children’s survey responses. When the adult being evaluated is present or handing over the tablet, children appear to inflate their answers, especially on questions about that adult. Crucially, however, the direction of the evaluations remained favorable under both conditions, which the authors interpret as evidence that the positive perception of student teachers persists beyond the effect of their mere presence. The practical implication is direct: pupil voice can inform practicum evaluation, but only if the questionnaire is administered by someone other than the student teacher being evaluated.

Age mattered just as much as who held the tablet. The youngest children, who answered a three-item pictographic questionnaire with faces instead of numbers, concentrated their responses in the highest category so overwhelmingly that their answers could not reliably distinguish between individual pupils. Statistical agreement coefficients told the story: raw agreement between first and second evaluations, separated by a median of seven days, exceeded 82 percent, yet Cohen’s kappa hovered near zero because the few lower responses rarely recurred a week later. In other words, the youngest pupils expressed a shared positive classroom climate rather than differentiated judgments about a particular student teacher.

Older pupils, by contrast, used their verbal scales far more selectively. Their responses showed fair to moderate stability on four of five items, with kappa values of 0.52 for learning something new, 0.42 for resource effectiveness, 0.36 for comfort asking for help, and 0.23 for perceived influence on learning. Latent class analysis identified two distinct profiles among them: a highly enthusiastic group comprising 68.8 percent of respondents, of whom 80 percent rated resources as very effective and 76 percent always felt comfortable asking for help, and a moderately favorable group of 31.2 percent who generally chose the second-highest options. Unfavorable responses never formed a class of their own in either questionnaire.

The theoretical stakes extend beyond Ecuador. Situated learning theory frames the practicum as a process through which student teachers move from peripheral to fuller participation in a community of practice, and the findings suggest that pupils accept student teachers as legitimate members of that classroom community. Prior research on the consequences of hosting trainees, from England, Spain and Washington State, had relied almost exclusively on achievement data, finding no harm and occasionally modest delayed gains. This study documents the relational experience that test scores cannot capture, and the nesting of responses within classrooms and schools, which accounted for up to half the variance of some items, indicates that the pupil experience depends heavily on the specific classroom in which a placement occurs.

The authors are candid about the limitations. The schools were located in only two provinces, most pupils attended primary education, the instruments used a single item per dimension to stay brief enough for young children, and project staff were not randomly assigned to classrooms. The authors also belong to the university whose program was examined, though the analyses explicitly probed the administrator bias this could introduce. Still, the scale of the dataset is uncommon in practicum research, and the combination of stability analyses, within-pupil comparisons and latent class analysis offers a replicable strategy for other teacher education programs. The broader message is one that resonates with children’s rights frameworks, including Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: pupils are competent informants about the teaching they receive, and when the conditions under which they are asked are designed with care, their voices can become a genuine, formative part of how schools and universities evaluate the classrooms they share.

Subject of Research: School pupils' perceptions of student teachers in teacher education practicum placements in Ecuador

Article Title: Practicum in host educational contexts: school students’ perceptions in Ecuador

Article References: Reiban-Garnica, D., & Saldaña-Gómez, D. (2026). Practicum in host educational contexts: school students’ perceptions in Ecuador. Frontiers in Education, 11, 1974190. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1974190

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1974190

Keywords: practicum, student teachers, pupil voice, teacher education, Ecuador, social desirability, survey methodology, latent class analysis, children as respondents, host schools, situated learning, classroom relationships