Tour of research on student evaluations of teaching [28-30]: Hogan 1978, Kaschak 1978, and Lombardo and Tocci 1979

Let's continue our discussion of studies in Holman et al. 2019 "Evidence of Bias in Standard Evaluations of Teaching" listed as "finding bias". See here for the first entry in the series and here for other entries.

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28.

I did not locate the text of Hogan 1978 "Review of the Literature: The Evaluation of Teaching in Higher Education", but I'm guessing from the "Review of the Literature" title that Hogan 1978 doesn't report novel data.

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29.

Kaschak 1978 "Sex Bias in Student Evaluations of College Professors" had 100 seniors or first-year graduate students at San Jose State University (50 male and 50 female) rate fictional professors in business administration, chemistry, home economics, elementary education, psychology, and history, based on descriptions of the professors' teaching methods and practices; each professor had a male name or a female name, depending on the form that a student received. Ratings were reported for 1-to-10 scales for: effective/ineffective, concerned/unconcerned, likeable/not at all likeable, poor/excellent, powerless/powerful, and definitely would/would not take the course.

Male students had mean ratings on each item that were more positive for the male professor than for the female professor. Female students had statistically different mean ratings by professor sex only for indicating that the male professor is more powerful and for indicating a preference for taking the female professor's course.

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30.

Lombardo and Tocci 1979 "Attribution of Positive and Negative Characteristics of Instructors as a Function of Attractiveness and Sex of Instructor and Sex of Subject" had 120 introductory psychology students (60 male and 60 female) rate a person in a photograph, with the experimental manipulation that the person in the photograph was male or female and was attractive or unattractive. Students were told that the photograph was of Mary Dickson or Andrew Dickson and were told that the person had earned a Ph.D. and had just finished a second year of teaching. Ratings included nine scales (such as from intelligent to not intelligent) and the items "Compared with the faculty members at this college, how would you rate the over-all teaching performance of this instructor?" and "How much would you like to take a course from this faculty member?".

Results indicated that "Each of the dependent measures was analyzed by a 2 (attractive vs unattractive) X 2 (sex of pictured person) X 2 (sex of subject) analysis of variance...A significant main effect was found...for attractive-unattractiveness. The absence of other main effects or interactions indicated that the attractive pictures were rated significantly more attractive" (p. 493) and that "An interaction between the attractiveness of the picture and the sex of the instructor...on the question of how much they would like to take a course from this instructor indicated that all subjects preferred to take a course from a male" (p. 494).

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Comments are open if you disagree, but I don't think that data from the 1970s is relevant for discussions of whether student evaluations of teaching should be used in employment decisions made in 2019 or beyond. For example, there has been a substantial increase since the 1970s in female representation among students and faculty, which can be plausibly expected to have reduced biases against female college faculty present during the Nixon administration.