The role teachers play in the quality of education provided to people has been something that has debated for many years, and especially so since global league tables, such as PISA, started comparing educational performance around the world.
It’s a topic examined afresh in a new paper from the United States Naval Academy, which aims to disentangle aspects of teacher quality that directly impact the learning and performance of the student.
The researchers utilized data from post-secondary education that links students from randomly assigned instructors in introductory-level courses to the subsequent performance of those students in follow-on courses in a range of subjects.
“Given that instructors determine the final grades of their students, there are both objective and subjective components of any academic performance measure,” the researchers explain. “For a subset of courses in our sample, however, final exams are created, administered, and graded by faculty who do not directly influence the final course grade. This enables us to disentangle faculty impacts on objective measures of student learning within a course (grade on final exam) from faculty-specific subjective grading practices (final course grade).”
Learning outcomes
For each of the courses the researchers have an objective grade that is provided by a committee and a subjective grade that is provided by the instructor. The analysis reveals that instructors who help boost the common final exam scores of their students also boost their performance in the follow-on course.
Instructors who tend to give out easier subjective grades however dramatically hurt subsequent student performance. Exploring a variety of mechanisms, the researchers suggest that instructors harm students not by “teaching to the test,” but rather by producing misleading signals regarding the difficulty of the subject and the “soft skills” needed for college success.
What’s more, this effect is stronger in non-STEM fields, among female students, and among extroverted students. Faculty that are well-liked by students—and thus likely prized by university administrators—and considered to be easy have particularly pernicious effects on subsequent student performance.
“What do we want higher education to achieve? Undergraduate education involves the inculcation of a variety of soft skills, such as good study habits, an appreciation for the time necessary to do the work, an ability to work with others, among other behavioral traits,” the authors conclude. “Colleges are also often anxious to please their students. Complaints regarding dry lectures, excessive difficulty of material or perceived lack of face-to-face time with faculty can worry administrators who rely on money from tuition-paying students, alumni, and donors.”
