Abstract
University students' ratings of teaching and teachers' performance are used in many parts of the world for the evaluation of faculty members at colleges and universities. Even though these ratings receive mixed reviews, there is little conclusive evidence on the role of the intervening variable of teacher and student gender in these ratings. Possible influences resulting from gender-related differences in different socio-cultural contexts, especially where gender combination in student and faculty population is not proportionate, have not been adequately investigated in previous research. This study aimed to examine Iranian university students' ratings of the professional performance of male and female university teachers and to explore the differences in male and female university students' evaluation of teachers of the same or opposite gender. The study was a questionnaire-based cross-sectional survey with a total of 800 randomly selected students in their different years of undergraduate study (307 male and 493 female students, reflecting the proportion of male and female students in the university) from different faculties at the University of Kashan, Iran. The participants rated male and female teachers’ performance in observing university regulations, relationship with colleagues, and relationships with students. The researchers used descriptive statistics, means comparison inferential statistics and focus-group interview data to analyze and compare the students’ ratings. The results of one-sample t-test, independent samples t-test, and Chi-square analyses showed that a) overall, male university teachers received significantly higher overall ratings in all areas than female teachers; b) male students rated male teachers significantly higher than female students did; and c) female students assigned a higher overall mean rating to male teachers than to female teachers but this mean difference was not significant. These results are studied in relation to the findings in the related literature and indicate that gender can be an important intervening variable in university students' evaluation of faculty members.
Highlights
Introduction and backgroundThe evaluation of the effectiveness of higher education and the performances of university teachers is an enormous task because of the multidimensionality of the teaching/learning processes and the involvement of individually and socially complicated human beings
Initial descriptive statistics showed that male university teachers achieved higher means than female teachers on all the items and as Table 1 shows, male university teachers were rated higher in observing university regulations, relationships with their colleagues, and relationships with students
One-sample T-test was performed in order to check the statistical significance of these differences between the means produced by male and female teachers and the results summarized in Table 2 indicate that all were significant: ratings in each category and in total were significantly higher for male teachers
Summary
The evaluation of the effectiveness of higher education and the performances of university teachers is an enormous task because of the multidimensionality of the teaching/learning processes and the involvement of individually and socially complicated human beings. In spite of this complexity, university teachers’ performances are constantly evaluated based on difference criteria to increase the standards of higher education, professional development, promotion, payment, tenure, grants and other similar. Formative and summative evaluations of teachers' performance take place in different ways in different institutions of higher education (Peterson, 2000). Student evaluations are a primary measure of the teaching performance of college and university faculty members in the US (Campbell, Steiner, & Gerdes, 2005, p. 211), Europe and many other parts of the world (Basow, 2000; Radmacher & Martin, 2001)
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