Exploring the personal and professional factors associated with 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 from RateMyProfessor.com and information regarding career and contemporary research performance indicators from the company Academic Analytics. 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 a rank 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.

The Case for Pragmatic Evidence-Based Higher Education: A Useful Way Forward?

“…Student feedback has been repeatedly shown to be subject to bias, dependent upon factors such as teacher's gender, ethnic background, age, qualification status and "attractiveness." It is also influenced by factors related to the subject being taught, such as perceived difficulty and expected grades (Basow and Martin, 2012;Boring et al, 2016;Fan et al, 2019;Murray et al, 2020).…”

“…In the United Kingdom the "National Student Survey" (NSS) of satisfaction is currently used to create league tables of universities and programmes. Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) data are an established aspect of hiring, tenure and promotion decisions about academic staff in many countries (Fan et al, 2019;Murray et al, 2020). This simplistic use of student feedback is one example of attempts to use basic metrics to evaluate the complex, difficult enterprise of HE [e.g., see (Robertson et al, 2019)].…”

Preparing for Tenure at a Research-Intensive University

“…Many tenure reviews also require peer evaluations of your teaching and will look for steady improvements over time, so teaching a new course every semester or quarter is not a good idea. Finally, it's important to note that teaching evaluations frequently reflect bias against certain categories of instructors, such as women and/or persons excluded because of their ethnicity or race (PEER scientists [25]) [26]. If you belong to these groups (or even if you don't!…”

Effects of Ratemyprofessors.com and University Student Evaluations of Teaching on Students’ Course Decision-Making and Self-Efficacy

“…Moreover, ample research suggests that RMP's evaluations are biased against some professors due to characteristics unrelated to teaching competence; for example, gender, age, ethnicity, and race. Some studies find that RMP evaluations favor men (Boehmer & Wood, 2017;Fisher et al, 2019;Murray et al, 2020;Storage et al, 2016) or women (Sohr-Preston et al, 2016), younger professors (Clayson, 2016;Murray et al, 2020;Stonebraker & Stone, 2015;Sohr-Preston et al, 2016), White professors (Reid, 2010), and individuals without an accent (Murray et al, 2020;Subtirelu, 2015;Subtirelu & Gopavaram, 2016).…”