Student Perception of Instructor Qualities: What Makes for Effective Professors?

Event Center A & B

Student Perceptions of Instructor Qualities: What Makes for Effective Professors? Although numerous individuals (e.g. faculty, administrators, and students) provide evaluative feedback regarding university instructors, past research has shown that student perceptions predict their learning outcomes most accurately. Thus, assessing those perceptions is an important component of understanding the qualities that define highly effective instructors when attempting to impact student success. Previous work suggests that the most effective instructors possess characteristics that fall into the following categories: content knowledge, personal qualities, and professional/ instructional qualities. The purpose of the current project is to pilot a measure of the determinants of instructional quality and to examine similarities and differences across class standing with respect to the most critical qualities identified by students. Three hundred seventeen undergraduates from a mid-size southern California public university completed a scale in which the importance of 75instructor characteristics was ranked on a 5-point scale (“not important” to “critical”). Demographic data (e.g., class standing, grade point average, and major) were also gathered. The scale was administered to participants during class meeting times. Specific efforts were made to sample from large general education courses on campus to increase the likelihood of a representative sample. Preliminary analyses indicate that there are similarities and differences across class standing (i.e., freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors) that are interesting and informative. Moreover, student perceptions of the most important instructor qualities demonstrate some consistency with previous work that highlighted the significance of content knowledge, as well as, personal and instructional characteristics.