Exploring the personal and professional factors associatedwith student evaluations of tenure-track faculty

Abstract

Tenure-track faculty members in the United States are evaluated on their performance in both research and teaching. In spite of accusations of bias and invalidity, student evaluations of teaching have dominated teaching evaluation at U.S. universities. However, studies on the topic have tended to be limited to particular institutional and disciplinary contexts. Moreover, in spite of the idealistic assumption that research and teaching are mutually beneficial, few studies have examined the link between research performance and student evaluations of teaching. In this study, we conduct a large scale exploratory analysis of the factors associated with student evaluations of teachers, controlling for heterogeneous institutional and disciplinary contexts. We source public student evaluations of teaching fromRateMyProfessor.comand information regarding career and contemporary research performance indicators from the companyAcademicAnalytics. The factors most associated with higher student ratings were the attractiveness of the faculty and the student’s interest in the class; the factors most associated with lower student ratings were course difficulty and whether student comments mentioned an accent or a teaching assistant. Moreover, faculty tended to be rated more highly when they were young, male, White, in the Humanities, and held arank of full professor. We observed little to no evidence of any relationship, positive or negative, between student evaluations of teaching and research performance. These results shed light on what factors relate to student evaluations of teaching across diverse contexts and contribute to the continuing discussion teaching evaluation and faculty assessment.

White fragility: An emotion regulation perspective.

“…Or, in the classroom, White students who are taught about White privilege tend to evaluate their teachers more negatively, likely rooted in feelings of discomfort and distress the students experienced when asked to reflect on their ingroup's unearned benefits (Boatright-Horowitz & Soeung, 2009). Given that course evaluations are weighted heavily when making promotion decisions (Murray et al, 2020), a negative evaluation can adversely impact an instructor's career or livelihood, demonstrating the stark longer-term interpersonal drawbacks of White fragility.…”