Abstract
Recent research has shown that instructor fluency can impact student judgments of learning and instructor ratings but has no real effect on actual learning. In addition, women tend to receive lower course and instructor evaluations than men. In the current study, we examined how instructor fluency and instructor gender influenced instructor evaluations and student learning. Participants watched a short lecture video. The speaker was either male or female and was either fluent (i.e., even paced in their speech) or disfluent (i.e., disorganized, made mistakes). Following the video, participants evaluated the instructor and took a quiz over the lecture. Results indicated that disfluency negatively affected quiz scores, but instructor gender did not. Participants rated the female speaker significantly lower than the male speaker, but only when the speaker was disfluent. These results are explained through the lens of attributional gender bias.
Highlights
Instructor and course ratings are often used in higher education to make decisions regarding promotion and tenure
If there is an over-reliance of student evaluations of teaching in promotion and tenure decisions, it could lead to instructors using methods that will increase these subjective ratings rather than enhance student learning (Carpenter et al, 2020b; Oppenheimer and Hargis, 2020)
The current study extended research from Carpenter et al (2020a) to clarify that disfluency can affect instructor ratings and highlighted that female instructors may be rated much lower than male instructors when they are illprepared for a lecture even though learning suffers in a disfluent lecture regardless of the gender of the instructor
Summary
Instructor and course ratings are often used in higher education to make decisions regarding promotion and tenure. The female instructor presented the lecture in a fluent manner (i.e., did not use her notes, maintained eye-contact, and stood up straight) or in a disfluent manner (used notes, looked away frequently, and slouched) They discovered that participants believed that they did not learn as much in the disfluent condition compared to the fluent condition, but their actual learning was equivalent across conditions. These findings were replicated by Carpenter et al (2016) who found that fluency could affect student perceptions of instructors in addition to their perceptions of learning. Students rated the fluent instructor significantly higher on organization, knowledge, preparedness, and effectiveness compared to the disfluent instructor
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