Are Professors Worth It?

Feld, Jan; Salamanca, Nicolás; Zölitz, Ulf

doi:10.3368/jhr.55.3.0417-8752r2

Cited by 23 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Pounder (2014) argues that teachers displaying transformational classroom leadership behaviours stimulate academic motivation and effort, engage students in instructional activities in their own time, engender self-efficacy and facilitate cognitive and affective learning. Ran and Xu (2019) and Feld et al (2020) analyse how various teacher characteristics impact student learning outcomes and student performance. One way that teacher performance is influential is through the emotions of students, as Goetz et al (2013) showed, for example, that a supportive presentation style was conducive to students exhibiting positive emotions like enjoyment and pride, while high levels of excessive demand from lessons were associated with negative emotions like anxiety, anger and helplessness.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the influence of student emotions and professor behaviour on course ratings: a quantitative analysis

Rybiński

2023

QAE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the relationship between student emotions, professors' performance and course ratings and difficulty. Design/methodology/approach Natural language processing models are used to extract six basic emotions and several categories of professors' harmful performance from nearly one million student reviews randomly selected from the website ratemyprofessors.com. These features are used in regression analysis to analyse their relationship with numerical ratings of course quality and course difficulty. Findings Negative emotions and bad performance by professors are detected more often for low-rated courses and courses perceived as more difficult by students. Positive emotions are seen for highly rated and less challenging courses. Practical implications This paper shows that natural language processing tools can be used to enhance and strengthen the quality assurance processes at universities. The proposed methods can improve the often-contested student evaluation of teaching practices, help students make better and more informed choices about their courses and assist instructors to better tailor their teaching approaches and create a more positive learning environment for their students. Originality/value This paper presents a novel analysis of how student emotions and poor performance by professors, derived automatically from teacher evaluations by students, affect course ratings. Results also lead to a novel hypothesis that the student–course emotional match or student tolerance of bad behaviour by professors can affect the performance of students and their chances of completing their degree.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the influence of student emotions and professor behaviour on course ratings: a quantitative analysis

Rybiński

2023

QAE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As we discuss below, we believe that the effect of TAs is unlikely to be consistent with the overall pattern of our findings. Previous research on the role of TAs suggest that they are unconnected with students' future academic outcomes (Feld et al, 2020). Moreover, we believe that using within cohort peer group randomization is an improvement over studies using between cohort comparisons.…”

Section: Summary Statisticsmentioning

confidence: 80%

Essays on the Economics of Education

Sandoy¹

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This thesis consists of four self-contained chapters on the economics of education. Chap-ter 1 focuses on the demand for higher education. Chapter 2 studies the effect of absence in Vocational Education and Training. Finally Chapter 3 and 4 are concerned with so-cial interactions. Chapter 3 studies the peer effects in relation to the gender gap for top earners and Chapter 4 studies the effect of alumni networks on labor market outcomes. In Chapter 1, ”Demand for Higher Education and Beliefs on Admission Chances”, I study the effects of reducing capacities for higher education programs on the demand by applicants. I model the applicants problem with a portfolio choice model, where I also explicitly model applicants individual beliefs on assignment probabilities. Using detailed application data covering all the applications for higher education in Denmark in 2014, combined with administrative register data I estimate the preferences of applicants for university programs. With the estimated preference parameters I can run policy experiments, where I reduce capacities for some programs. I compare the results from the policy experiments for two different scenarios, a) where applicants can take the changes to capacities into account and b) the current setting where capacities are only partly revealed ex post, and applicants cannot take them into account. I find that applicants change their preferences to take changes in capacities into account when I allow them to update their beliefs. Further, I find that the changes are not one to one with reductions in capacities and that applicants to other programs also changes their applications in response to ripple effects caused by the implemented matching mechanism. In Chapter 2, ”Absence and Completion among students in Vocational Education”, which is joint work with Fane N. Groes and Edith Madsen, we analyze the effect of school absence on program completion among students in Vocational Education in Denmark. We use data collected on daily student attendance in combination with register data on graduation and background characteristics. As the student absence is likely endogenous in relation to completion, we use an instrumental variable approach to estimate the causal effect. We use different meteorological weather observations as instruments for students’ absence and find that absence has a large and significant negative effect on the probability for completion. We support our results with a second instrument, which is based on the fact that have a panel dimension in student absences, while completion is crossectional. In Chapter 3, ”University Peers and Labour Market Gender Gaps”, which is joint work with Alexander Fischer, Andrei Gorshkov, and Jeanette Walldorf, we investigate how university peers affect the divergence in career paths of male and female students at the top of the income distribution. We use university records covering 21 cohorts of incoming students that are randomly assigned to tutorial groups in Copenhagen Business School and merge it with high-quality administrative register data on students’ careers. We show that females who are assigned to peers of higher ability suffer severe earnings losses, have weaker labor market attachment, are less likely to work in positions with management responsibilities, and to reach the top of the earnings distribution. The negative effect on female careers is more pronounced for high-ability female students and driven by exposure to male peers. To identify mechanisms underlying the effect, we investigate how peer ability shapes education outcomes and fertility behavior. We conclude that the differential reaction of male and female students to academic environ-ments characterized by high-ability peers contributes to labor market gender gaps. In Chapter 4, ”Peers and Careers: Labour Market Effects of Alumni Networks” which is joint work with the same set of coauthors, we study the importance of social connec-tions formed among university peers in terms of shaping their future careers. We use the same data as in Chapter 3. We find that students randomly assigned to the same tutorial group tend to have more similar careers than students from the same cohort but a different tutorial group: they tend to work in the same occupations and industries and are more likely to be hired by the same employer. The strongest ”excess” similarities of tutorial group peers over cohort peers are observed at the most disaggregated level, the workplace. This effect is strong, persistent (although decreasing over time), charac-terized by homophily, and pronounced the most for students from the wealthiest family backgrounds. By comparing the transitions of students to workplaces with incumbent group peers to workplaces with incumbent cohort peers, we find that students benefit from their alumni network by gaining access to more stable and higher-paying jobs.

show abstract

“…Note that, since students were assigned randomly conditionally on gender, age and Danish citizenship, we always compare pairs of students conditioning on these covariates 18. Previous research suggests that instructors with higher academic rank are unrelated with students' future academic outcomes(Feld et al, 2020) 19. We believe that using within cohort peer group randomization is an improvement over studies using between cohort comparisons.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Essays on the Economics of Education and Labour Market

Walldorf

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This thesis consists of three chapters on the economics of education and labor market. Chapter 1 focuses on discontinuation decisions at the Technical University of Denmark, and Chapter 2 and 3 study peer effects and social connections among Business Economics students at Copenhagen Business School. Chapter 1, ”An Event-History Analysis of Students Discontinuation Decisions”, inves-tigates the discontinuation decision of university students in their first university study program in Denmark. Particularly, the chapter studies the decision for students enrolled at the Technical University of Denmark. The chapter has two main contributions: The first contribution is the evidence of time dependence in the discontinuation probability that is observed with a continuous-time model using a rich data structure. The chapter confirms previous findings in the literature that the first year of study is of particular importance, and adds the empirical observation of within year dependence related to the typical outside option of an alternative study program offer. It further adds the observation that decisions are made without much knowledge from the exam process to form academic expectations. The second contribution of the chapter is methodological. The chapter suggests a model that extends the current competing risk model in the educational literature to allow for i) stochastic decision times, ii) separation of the destination state depending on the outside option, and iii) separation of the enrollment state to allow for stochastic arrival of exam information. The exam information brings study progression when an exam is passed and performance information when an exam is graded. The suggested model treats the discontinuation decision in sequential competing steps with the exam result arrivals and finds that information from grades only affect discontinuation decisions to a limited extent. I use this model to simulate the effect of exam information on the discontinuation decision of the students, and I find that 19%of discontinuation decisions in the first academic year can be explained by the students accumulated GPA. This estimate is in the low end compared to the literature and can be explained by a high level of early discontinuation decisions. Chapter 2, ”University Peers and Labour Market Gender Gaps”, which is joint work with Alexander Fischer, Andrei Gorshkov, and Tróndur M. Sandoy, investigates how university peers affect the divergence in career trajectories of male and female students to top-earning jobs in the Danish labour market. We use university records covering 21 cohorts of incoming students randomly assigned to peer groups in a large Business Economics program in Denmark and merge it with high-quality administrative register data on students’ careers. This setup allows us to estimate the effect of peer ability on students’ labour market outcomes many years post matriculation. We find that male students assigned to higher-achieving peers are largely unaffected. On the other hand, we find that female students assigned to peers of higher ability suffer severe earnings losses, have weaker labour market attachment, are less likely to work in positions with management responsibilities, and are less likely to reach the top of the earnings distribution. The negative effect on female careers is driven by exposure to higher-achieving male peers. To explore potential reasons for the negative effect, we investigate how peer ability af-fects educational outcomes and family decisions. Female students who are assigned to higher-achieving peers are more likely to discontinue from their study, and are less likely to have either a Bachelor or a Master degree 10 years post matriculation. We show that higher-achieving peers have limited effect on family decisions. In Chapter 3, ”Peers and Careers: Labour Market Effects of Alumni Networks” which is also joint work with Alexander Fischer, Andrei Gorshkov, and Tróndur M. Sandoy, we study the importance of social connections formed among university peers in terms of shaping their future careers. We find that students randomly assigned to the same peer group tend to have more similar careers than students from the same cohort but a different peer group: they tend to work in the same occupations and industries and are more likely to be hired by the same employer. The strongest ”excess” similarity of group peers over cohort peers are observed at the most disaggregated level, the workplace. This effect is strong, persistent (although decreasing over time), characterized by homophily, and pronounced the most for students from the wealthiest family backgrounds. By comparing the transitions of students to firms with incumbent group peers to firms with incumbent cohort peers, we find that students benefit from their connections by gaining access to more stable and higher-paying jobs.

show abstract

Are Professors Worth It?

Cited by 23 publications

References 14 publications

Exploring the influence of student emotions and professor behaviour on course ratings: a quantitative analysis

Exploring the influence of student emotions and professor behaviour on course ratings: a quantitative analysis

Essays on the Economics of Education

Essays on the Economics of Education and Labour Market

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About