Interest in those teacher characteristics that make instruction effective is long-standing. Since the 1930s, we’ve been asking students, faculty, alums, and administrators to identify the ingredients or components of effective instruction, and the same or similar characteristics are named with some regularity. The assumption has been that good teaching promotes learning, and there’s research that justifies that conclusion. However, for the last several decades attention has shifted from teaching to learning, a long-overdue shift in focus. Nonetheless, the important role played by good teaching should not be forgotten. In addition to what we teach and the strategies we use when we teach, the delivery of the instruction makes a difference. A couple of recent studies call us back to those ingredients of instruction that students repeatedly report help them learn but with some interesting updates.
Goldman, Cranmer, Solitto, Labelle, and Lancaster (2017) culled the literature in communication education and identified 10 widely ranging teacher behaviors with documented positive effects: clarity, caring, competence, trustworthiness, relevance, assertiveness (willingness to take a stand and argue for a position), responsiveness (sensitive and reactive to the needs of others), immediacy (verbal and nonverbal behaviors that promote psychological closeness), self-disclosure, and humor. The researchers were interested in two questions: First, which of these 10 behaviors are most preferred by college students? Second, did student entitlement beliefs influence their choice of instructional behaviors and characteristics?
Over 200 undergraduate students representing 16 majors were asked to imagine an ideal instructor. They were given the list of 10 characteristics and asked to value each characteristic with a dollar amount, with no characteristic worth more than $10 and with the total amount allocated not to exceed $20. They were asked to repeat the task, but this time they had $60 with which to value the characteristics.
As for results, “. . . across both limited and luxury budgets, three qualities were consistently prioritized as students’ most preferred behaviors/characteristics: clarity, competence, and relevance” (Goldman et al., 2017, p. 291, emphasis added). This student cohort wanted teachers who were easy to understand; who were content experts; and who established the relevance of the content to their needs, goals, and career objectives. The two characteristics students most often assessed as luxuries were self-disclosure and immediacy. Now, when students had a bigger budget, the importance of those two qualities increased. The researchers caution, however, against ignoring those teaching characteristics that tend to be more relational (i.e., those characteristics that engage students on an affective level). There is much research documenting that students respond to these characteristics positively, and these findings do not dispute that. They simply were not the top priorities of these students.
To answer the second question regarding the impact of self-entitlement beliefs, students took an Academic Entitlement Questionnaire developed and used by other researchers. It included questions like, “If I don’t do well on a test, the professor should make tests easier or curve the grades.” Researchers divided the cohort in half, with those above the medium being considered students with high levels of self-entitlement and those in the bottom half considered students with low levels. The objective here was not to document the extent of self-entitlement among students.
Goldman et al. (2017) confirmed that “academic entitlement influenced student preferences for effective teaching behaviors” (p. 291). Students in the high entitlement group placed greater value on caring, immediacy, and responsiveness. “Entitled students may want their instructors to focus more on them, rather than the process of learning” (p. 292).
A study by Gerhardt (2016) compared how millennial students, often assumed to be more entitled than other generational cohorts, and faculty rated the impact of competence, character, and sociability on the teacher’s credibility. Sociability in this case refers to the importance of social behaviors in the classroom. When teachers act more like facilitators than authority figures, when they lecture less and have students collaborating more, those teachers are perceived to have higher levels of sociability. Millennial students have “a strong need to be heard, recognized, and included in the process of learning” (p. 1536). It was landmark research identifying seven key traits of millennials—special, sheltered, confident, team-oriented, achieving, pressured, and conventions—that led Gerhardt to suspect that there might be differences in how faculty and millennials viewed these characteristics. She thought it was a question worth studying because beliefs shape expectations and influence the behavior of students and teachers.
And what she found confirmed her suspicions. Students and faculty shared similar views on the importance of competence and character, but “they had significantly different ratings for sociability” (p. 1539). Students believed sociability was more important than character, whereas faculty rated character as more important than sociability.
Gerhardt was also interested in a second question: If the values placed on these components of instructor credibility are different, how important is that? For example, does sociability play a role in the dynamics of student engagement? To answer that question, she looked at four kinds of engagement identified in previous research: skill engagement, like note taking and study strategies; emotional engagement, meaning perceptions of the relevance of course content; participation engagement, as in interaction between classmates and the instructor; and performance engagement, reflected by how well the students performed in the class. Students were asked to think of the most sociable instructor they had had and then, with that person in mind, respond to questions relating to these four kinds of engagement.
She predicted that sociability would have the greatest impact on emotional and participation engagement: “This prediction was based on the notion that having a talkative, interactive professor would likely create a classroom culture with more discussion and positive emotional interaction” (pp. 1542–1543). But that prediction was not confirmed. Instructor sociability had the greatest impact on performance engagement, followed by skill engagement. “While this finding is surprising, it suggests that perceived instructor sociability exerts influence beyond the culture it creates in a classroom: it also significantly impacts student behaviors necessary for both skill-building and performance” (p. 1543).
As students change, so do their beliefs about and expectations for teachers. That’s not to say that we abandon who we are to become who they want us to be, but we do need to understand their expectations. In some cases, we should be responsive to their needs as learners. In other situations, we may need to explain how our choices relate to our teaching and their learning.
References: Goldman, Z. W., Cranmer, G. A., Solitto, M., Labelle, S., & Lancaster, A. L. (2017). What do college students want? A prioritization of instructional behaviors and characteristics. Communication Education, 66(3), 280–298.
Gerhardt, M. W. (2016). The importance of being . . . social? Instructor credibility and the millennials. Studies in Higher Education, 41(9), 1533–1547.
