Abstract
Substantial research has been done on the effects of appearance on first impressions and general social and professional interactions. The authors of this article attempted to expand on this by investigating whether appearance can be linked to not just perceptions of competence on the part of teachers but to an actual demonstrable increase in instructor effectiveness. They fail miserably in this endeavor and appear to believe they succeeded.
Introduction
Attractive people get better responses from other people pretty much across the board. This isn’t news to anyone; attractive people are more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt in any given situation, more likely to make a good first impression and more likely to have people go out of their way to please or cater to them. Because of that it should not come as a surprise to anyone that “researchers consistently find that people equate beauty with goodness and believe attractive individuals possess numerous positive qualities, but few negative attributes” (Gurung, p. 5). Given this it should come as no surprise that physically attractive teachers receive better evaluations of their teaching performance by students, or that the students claim to learn better from them. But there is a big difference between people thinking that an attractive person has other positive qualities and is better at their job than a less attractive person and showing that being attractive can actually make someone better at their job, in this case teaching, and that is what this article sets out to prove. The abstract does not address is the question of whether the students in question are correct in their assessment, though one of their hypotheses going in was “that instructors’ personal qualities (e.g., appearance, approachableness, likeability) would positively correlate with and predict student learning” (Gurung, p. 6). Their introduction similarly cites sources discussing the link between teacher qualities such as appearance and likeability and student perception of learning, but none on the link between those qualities and action student learning.
Methodology
The methods section of gives a thorough summary of the criteria they used for their research participants, and it is utterly inappropriate for the study in question. The article uses an online survey of hundreds of students of various grades and majors evaluating their instructors as source material. That is fine as a starting point, but the way they are used constitutes a warning sign straight from the get go. Both the abstract and the authors’ stated hypotheses in the introduction focus on link between teacher attractiveness and student learning. The title of the article notwithstanding attractiveness is defined broadly to cover a range of positive qualities such as physical appearance, likability, how approachable the teacher is perceived as being and so forth, as well as relevant factors not directly tied to the teacher’s appearance and manner such as grades and overall perceived difficulty of the course. The final list of variables entered were “attractiveness, formality of dress, approachability, class difficulty, attendance, liking, and participation” (Gurung, p. 7).
The problem with this methodology lies in the self-reported, self-selected nature of the data and the participants. People in general and undergraduate college students in particular are notoriously bad at accurate self-evaluation, especially when it comes to subjects such as “how smart am I and how well did I learn something and whose fault is it that I made a bad grade?” This means that right from the beginning the reliability of the study’s data is seriously open to question.
Results
The article claims that “likeability and student behaviors predicted significant portions of variance in self-reported learning over and above that predicted by student demographics and instructor sex and perceived age (Gurung, p.8). They derive this from using “hierarchical multiple regression analyses to predict both students’ perceptions of their learning and their grade in the class from the personal characteristics and student behavior variables,” something they base on a series of blocks based on student qualities, instructor qualities and class format combined with variable qualities such as attractiveness and attendance in the last block (Gurung, p. 8). Further, they found that “the instructor’s personal characteristics predicted significant portions of variance in likability over and above that predicted by student demographics” (Gurung, p. 8). This is related both narratively to describe the methodology used and in the form of a pair of tables showing the correlation between student and instructor qualities such as approachability, attractiveness, class attendance, participation and perceived difficulty. All of this, they claim, indicates a strong verifiable correlation between student learning and personal instructor qualities.
Discussion and Conclusions
The researchers found “several significant predictors of participants’ class performance and self-reported learning,” with “by far the strongest single predictor of self-reported grades” being likability of the professor” (Gurung, p. 8). Likability was predicted by a combination of instructor and student qualities such as attractiveness or attendance and participation. What it failed to do is make the jump between students saying their learned the course material better and demonstrating that the students actually did learn the course material better. We have already established that the self-reported, self-selected nature of the researcher’s data is a serious problem that casts doubt on the reliability of their results. But beyond that, the researchers say in their methodology section that “students most commonly reported an A/B as their course grad,” which was “consistent with the average grade of B recorded across courses in a recent semester at this institution” (Gurung, pp. 6-7). This means that not only did their data rely on subjective self-reported assessments of learning, it is contrasted with objective data showing that the participants’ grades were not significantly higher than the norm for a random sampling of students at their institution! Between those issues and the researchers’ inability to objectively define factors such as appearance, likability and approachability or control for differing perceptions thereof between individuals or demographics their findings are of very limited value except insofar as they cast still more doubt on the wisdom of linking instructor raises and promotions to student evaluations.
References
Gurung, R. (2007). Looking Good, Teaching Well? Linking Liking, Looks, and Learning. Teaching of Psychology, 34 (1), 5-9.
