Improve the writing the Role of Attraction in Teaching?

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Abstract

We examine the studies that record the part of the passion for advancing scholarly accomplishment, course decisions, and vacation choices, and review the procedure of intrigue advancement. Specifically, we concentrate on the part of achieving objectives in advancing the view of errand esteems and ensuing interest, and audit randomized field trials in which we tried a test utility esteem intercession intended to promote the passion for educational settings. We talk about the suggestions for institutional arrangement and hypothesis advancement.

For this research the data collected from the ‘ratemyprofessor.com’ which is from 12 universities. In this research, we were interested in the Hotness, Overall Quality, and Level of Difficulty characteristics from ‘ratemyprofessor.com’ of professors from universities in the North, South, and West. For the result consideration, the Pearson’s correlation and one-way ANOVA used to see the relationship among Overall Quality (OQ) and Level of Difficulty (LoD).

The results show that students are biased in the ratings because they deviated from rating the performances and started depending on how people look as the unattractive professors who were teaching challenging courses would receive a low grade regardless of the difficulty of the course. Quality in the West region was high, but North and South regions recorded the same results in quality. Also, there was no significant difference across regions on the levels of attractiveness. The Western region having a difference in quality and difficulty was also a main effect. The students will support the Southern professor who is hotter in scores.

The Role of Attraction in Teaching

The evaluation of teaching professionals by students have been a substantial part of university classrooms. Universities use student evaluations to measure individual professor’s teaching effectiveness. Higher education institutions also use these evaluations as a mature consideration for promotion, tenure, and merit (Otto, Stanford, & Ross, 2008). Usually, students evaluated the effectiveness of faculty staff by filling out formal forms with well-defined performance evaluation questions. Today, student evaluations of faculty staff have moved from classroom to the Internet. Examples of online professors’ rating websites include RateMyProfessor.com, PssCollege.com, ProfessorPerformance.com, RatingsOnline.com, and Reviewum.com. RateMyProfessor.com is the most popular online professor-rating site and is widely studied.

In the analysis of RateMyProfessor.com, students are given a chance to provide different kinds of appraisals such as voluntary and anonymous approaches that are directed to their professors. RateMyProfessor.com, launched in 1999, has seen a growth towards the use and affiliation of schools in dependence of the site when choosing a specific professor for a specific course. In the United States of America, Canada, and United Kingdom, there are more than 1.6 million professors and 7000 institutions that are using the site in providing evaluations. Different aspects are rated when the site is used such as the professor’s clarity, easiness and helpfulness that they give to students and ratings are placed on a scale between 1 and 5. After data is collected, the requirement is that the ratings provided on clarity and professor’s helpfulness are averaged which will then help in determining an overall performance of these professors. It is also interesting to note that RateMyProfessor.com gives the students a chance to make comments about their professors.

Kowai-Bell, Guadagno, Little, Preiss, and Hensley (2011) have investigated the relationship between RateMyProfessor.com and content and student’s perceived control. This research included two studies. In study 1, participants recalled their past experiences visiting RateMyProfessor.com and how the ratings of a certain professor affected their attitude toward taking their courses. Most participants in this study reported a positive impression, increased perceived control, and positive classroom experience. In study 2, the participants read and evaluated both negative and positive comments about a particular professor. The results of this study show that positive comments have a more positive effect on perceived control, grade expectancy, and attitude towards the class than negative comments. Overall, results of this study indicate that RateMyProfessor content influences student’s expectations and attitudes towards a potential course.

The main considerations are on quantitative and qualitative evaluation processes. Findings from research indicated that the students found the site to be reliable platforms when it comes to the selection of courses and are traditional sources for the selection of required courses (Laundry, Kurkul & Poirier, 2010). It was also indicated that there is a use and dependence on qualitative and quantitative information, which students will use in making decisions such as deciding whether it will be beneficial or not to undertake a particular course program. Therefore, when there are negative implications and comments that are made on RateMyProfessor.com, the students will be affected and hesitant to take courses where a professor’s comment on clarity, easiness and usefulness are negatively advocated.

In 2013, Scherr, Fast and Muller conducted their research and it was focused on finding out the impact of overall rating based on single comments made on a professor on RateMyProfessor.com. These studies were based on assessing the student’s judgments as well as course intention selections. There were results which indicated that average rating that is quantitative evaluation and single comments on qualitative information were both used by students. However, both of these aspects were established to have stronger influences when it came to making judgments about an individual’s course selection. Single comments scored higher on the influence aspects as opposed to analysis of the overall ratings (Laundry, Kurkul & Poirier, 2010).

The information stated gives a clear indication that students have a trust on anonymous individual comments due to the fact that it reflects on personalized experiences that the raters have encountered with the professor in the given course program. It should also be understood that single comments and how positive these comments are could be biased as some students might not like the professor and they will end up making negative comments to affect the reputation of the professor. Therefore, it should be elaborated on the effective considerations that have to be undertaken while depending on the information from the site. Students should be encouraged that they should not only base their perceptions on personal experience made by the singular comments. A careful analysis and investigation will be the main guiding principle that students should focus on about course selection and what they wish to study. Consequently, when there are low ratings, students should not be discouraged that it might bar them from achieving their required dreams in education. We hypothesized that higher overall quality ratings were given to professors rated as hot. In addition, we used different regions to make sure the results were consistent in the United States.

Methods

Materials

We collected our data from ‘ratemyprofessors.com,’ a public-access website designed for college students to review their professors on many levels such as Overall Quality and Level of Difficulty; these are both on a scale from 1 to 5. In addition to those ratings, students can say whether they will take the professor again, if attendance is mandatory, and if the professor is attractive. Attractiveness lies on if the professor is hot or not and results in a red chili pepper. Students then have the option to add tags; for example, ‘Tough Grader’, ‘Hilarious’, ‘Lots of Homework’. For our study, we were interested in the Hotness, Overall Quality, and Level of Difficulty characteristics from ‘ratemyprofessor.com’ of professors from universities in the North, South, and West.

Procedure

To decide which professors to take data from, we first had to decide which universities to look at. We chose to look at a private and a public university from the North, South, and West. These universities were randomly chosen from two different lists: ‘50 Public Colleges with the Best Return on Investment’ and ‘50 Private Colleges with the Best Return on Investment’. We then looked at the chosen universities, making sure each had at least ten Psychology professors and collected the data from the professors who have at least ten reviews, collecting a maximum of 30 from each university. We collected data about Overall Quality, Level of Difficulty, and Hotness. For Hotness, Hot=1, Not-Hot=2.

Results

Pearson’s r correlations were used to look at the relationship between Overall Quality (OQ) and Level of Difficulty (LoD). As shown in Table 1, a significant negative correlation was found, r=-.45, p<.01. Then, an independent t-test was used to look at OQ and LoD on Hotness. As seen in Table 2, there is a significant relationship between OQ and Hot, f(1, 282) = 21.39, p<.01, (M_Hot=1.77, M_OQ=3.74) as well as a relationship between Not-Hot and Difficulty, f(1, 282) = 6.198, p=.01 (M_NotHot=.23, M_LoD=2.75). Then, a One-Way ANOVA was used to examine the differences in Hotness, OQ, and LoD between the regions (North, South, and West). As shown in Table 3, we found no significant difference in Hotness between the regions, p=.18. There is a significant difference in Difficulty between the West and the South, p<.05, with the West being more difficult (M_LoDSouth=2.62, M_LoDWest=2.85). The West has a significantly higher OQ from the North and the South, p<.05.

Table 1.

Table 2.

Table 3.

Discussion

The results selected and investigated were conducted from 12 universities. Using 12 Universities is a clear indication and a proper sample that it will give an idea about how RateMyProfessor.com helps in selection of programs among the students in the community. The first point of consideration is the difficulty versus quality that is achieved, and this is based on the professor’s approach in class teaching. These factors were noted to be significant and contributing to decision-making that students make when it comes to course selection. It was evident that the higher the difficulty that was expressed in the professor teaching an individual course, the lower the quality recorded. In this case, quality is defined by how a professor’s teaching style is and the delivery of the contents in class. Students recorded that when a course is difficult, the professor is also unhelpful when delivering teaching concepts about the course. Therefore, most students will avoid undertaking difficult concepts and courses where teachers are not supporting learners to achieve their success and set objectives in the course.

When assessing the quality of course content delivery, it emerged that there was no significant difference across regions when it comes to hot verses not being hot as a professor. Among the thoughts and ideas of scholars, it was evident that the professors who were rated as being hot teachers received higher ratings by quality. On the other hand, those teachers who were termed as not hot received higher ratings on difficulty indicating that students would not prefer unattractive professors to teach them in the institution or in the courses that they have selected. In this assessment when a professor is harder on certain actions and activities, the teacher was destined to receive lower quality ratings (Johnson & Crews, 2012). The theme showcased that students are biased in the ratings because they deviated from rating the performances and started depending on how people look as the unattractive professors who were teaching challenging courses would receive a low grade regardless of the difficulty of the course.

The assessment was also done based on the region's quality and difficulty. There was a hotness balance achieved despite the areas that are North, South or the Western Region and therefore, the study established that quality and difficulty are both significant (Laundry, Kurkul & Poirier, 2010). The West region showed a difference in quality and difficulty indicating that the West region showed a higher rating in quality and difficulty. Quality in the West region was high, but North and South regions recorded the same results in quality.

We rejected the hypothesis because the higher overall quality ratings were given to professors rated as hot. In addition, there were no significant difference across regions on the levels of attractiveness. I expected hotness to have a significant relationship with a positive rating and the South to have the most attractive professors. The Western region having a difference in quality and difficulty was also a main effect. The students will support the Southern professor who is hotter in scores because these learners feel that a hot teacher will be easy in interaction and course content delivery (Johnson & Crews, 2012). However, that should not be the case, and students should deviate from using the hotness of a professor as a mark in selecting a course or a class study. The reason is that when this factor is depended on, students might deviate from learning and end up focusing on the hotness of the professor which will affect the student’s academic performance.

There was a limitation experienced in the research, as some students in the schools did not participate enough to our required standards. The ratings of the schools were a challenge because some schools did not receive a minimum of 10 ratings required for sampling. As a researcher, these points have to be achieved and thought out before sampling and data collection is done.

In the future, it will be interesting to include and use different schools that have more than 50 ratings. Ivy Leagues are larger than private liberal arts college and smaller than a typical public state university. They are also more prestigious, tough to get into, and are ranked among the best universities worldwide. I believe that including Ivy Leagues schools could give a clear and true reflection about the ratings on RateMyProfessor.com

Quality Correlations Pearson Correlation. Sig. (2-tailed) N Difficulty Pearson Correlation Sig. (2-tailed) N Quality 1 284 ** -.446 Difficulty -.446 .000 284 1 .000 284 ** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). 284 Quality Difficulty Equal variances assumed Equal variances not assumed Equal variances assumed Equal variances not assumed Levene s Test for Equality of Variances F 21.392 6.198 Sig. .000 .013 Independent Samples Test t 5.506 7.056 -2.834 -3.191 df 282 166.189 282 125.106 Sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .005 .002 t-test for Equality of Means Meani Difference 55764 .55764 -.27986 -.27986 Std. Error Difference 10129 .07903 09875 .08770 95% Confidence Interval of the Difference Lower .35827 .40162 -.47423 -45343 Upper .75702 .71367 -.08549 -.10629 Tukey HSD Dependent Variable Quality Difficulty (J) Region South West North West North South South West North West North South South West North West North South *. The mean difference is significant at the 0.05 level. Hot (1) Region North South West North South West North South Multiple Comparisons West Mean Difference (I- J) -.01294 -.28115* 01294 -.26821 .28115 26821 15971 -.07444 -.15971. -.23415 07444 23415 03508 11147 -.03508 .07639 -.11147 -.07639 Std. Error 11039 11015 .11039 .10390 11015 .10390 10427 .10404 .10427 09813 10404 09813 .06226 .06213 .06226 .05860 .06213 .05860 Sig. .992 .030 .992 .028 .030 .028 278 .755 .278 .046 .755 .046 840 .173 .840 .394 .173 .394 95% Confidence Interval Lower Bound -.2731 -.5407 -.2472 -.5130 .0216 .0234 -.0860 -.3196 -.4054 -.4654 -.1707 .0029 -.1116 -.0349 -1818 -.0617 -.2579 -.2145 Upper Bound .2472 -.0216 .2731 -.0234 .5407 .5130 .4054 .1707 .0860 -.0029 .3196 .4654 1818 .2579 1116 .2145 .0349 .0617