College Student Ratings And Teacher Behavior: an Experimental Study

Abstract

This study was designed to explore the hypothesis that student ratings accurately reflect selected teacher behaviors (vagueness terms and mazes) in social science. Subjects were 80 undergraduate students who were randomly assigned to one of two teaching conditions, high clarity vs. low clarity teaching. Students rated the high clarity teaching significantly higher than the low clarity teaching, t (78) = 6.22, p<.001. The authors concluded that college students can accurately distinguish between high and low clarity lessons on the basis of selected low-inference teaching behaviors. Additional findings suggested that there is no causal link between vagueness terms/teacher mazes and student achievement at the knowledge (recall) level of the cognitive domain.