This research studied the impact of language barriers and cultural experiences on students' perceptions at the University of North Texas. The population of this study were students who had taken a class with a non-native speaking instructor and those who hadn't. Following a mixed-method research approach, online surveys were distributed to the…

Via AI video generators, it is possible to create educational videos with humanistic instructors by simply providing a script. The characteristics of video types and features of instructors in videos impact video engagement and, consequently, performance. This study aimed to compare the impact of human instructors and AI-generated instructors in…

Background: Faculty might disclose personal information in order to illustrate a concept related to course material. However, the impact of self-disclosing potentially personal information (e.g., medical or mental health) is unclear. Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine how students perceive professors who self-disclose personal…

Lecturing is often touted as a means to inspire students' interest, despite evidence that most lectures fail to do so. This study examines triggers of students' situational interest during lectures. Students (N = 706) in 12 different individual one hour first year lectures in a UK university were surveyed at the end of the lecture. They described…

Background: Two important influences on students' evaluations of teaching are relationship and professor effects. Relationship effects reflect unique matches between students and professors such that some professors are unusually effective for some students, but not for others. Professor effects reflect inter-rater agreement that some professors…

This set of experiments assessed the influence of RateMyProfessors.com profiles, and the perceived credibility of those profiles, on students' evaluations of professors and retention of material. In Study 1, 302 undergraduates were randomly assigned to read positive or negative RateMyProfessors.com profiles with comments that focused on…

Faculty members ("N" = 39) from two universities had their lectures recorded. From these videos, we selected 5-min vignettes centered on eight dimensions of the Teacher Behavior Checklist. Undergraduate students from two universities ("N" = 753) viewed three 5-min video clips of college teachers across various disciplines.…

Instructors of large lecture classes face a variety of challenges, including student engagement and participation. With budget cuts and increasing class sizes, more schools may turn to large lecture/lab formats for the basic communication course (Stanley & Porter, 2002); instructors must understand how these classes engage students. One viable…

This study investigated the effect that varying degrees of faculty self-promotion had on 322 student evaluations. As high student evaluations are correlated with greater student learning, it is imperative that we assess how faculty's presentation style is perceived by students so as to enhance instruction and therefore student learning. Students…

The benefits of a "developing" teaching style, in which a specific topic is developed on a white- or blackboard, commonly known as "chalk and talk", have been widely acknowledged. However, one of the drawbacks of this teaching approach is the transient nature of the notes. Students are reliant on the correctness of their copies for revisions,…

This study examined students' preferences for lecturers' personalities on three continents. Two-hundred and 35 university students in Malaysia, 347 university students in Britain and 139 university students in the United States provided ratings of 30 desirable and undesirable lecturer trait characteristics, which were coded into an internally…

The purpose of this study was to quantify the irritating behaviors of professors as experienced and reported by 232 Le Moyne College students. In this study, "irritating behavior" was understood as "actions that vex, annoy, bother, pester, frustrate, or provoke anger." The survey used in this study was developed by Larry M. Ludewig, Ph.D.,…

To what extent do students and teachers hold similar beliefs about excellent teaching? Do differences in beliefs have practical implications (e.g., how students rate their teachers on end-of-semester evaluation forms)? In Study 1, undergraduate students (N=414) and faculty members (N=128) responded to questionnaires assessing their perceptions of…

This paper examines the relationship between quality of instruction of faculty members as assessed by students and the assessment periods involved. It is based on analysis carried out in Israel's largest public college. Our aim was to explore whether investments to improve the quality of instruction of faculty members are cost beneficial. The…