Effective teaching requires teacher confidence. It impacts teachers’ performance and students’ reactions and learning outcomes. However, as we expected, there are major differences between male and female professors regarding self-confidence, student evaluations, and the connection between the two. We found that elevating the self-confidence of female professors in their ability to design a course is one of the most effective ways that schools can engage with teachers to raise student evaluations.
Along with co-authors Amanda Nimon-Peters, Katarzyna Bachnik, and Sonia Scrocchi, all of us from the Hult International Business School, our research sought ways how teacher self-confidence impacts student learning experiences. The full paper was recently published in the International Journal of Educational Management.
Defining Teacher Confidence
Teacher confidence (or, more precisely, “self-efficacy,” to use academic jargon) isn’t monolithic. Through more than 30 interviews, we found that teachers can have three different types of confidence: confidence in designing courses, confidence in managing the activities and students within the classroom, and confidence in giving feedback to students. Through a survey, we collected the self-perceptions of 84 professors relating to these three aspects of confidence. We then sought correlations between these measures and over 20,000 evaluations from more than 1,300 students of the courses these professors had taught.
The most important conclusion from the paper is that, in almost all circumstances, teachers with higher levels of self-confidence received higher student evaluations. It is impossible to determine which came first: teacher confidence or student appreciation. It’s possible that teacher confidence blossomed after receiving positive feedback from students for a few courses. Or it is possible that teachers who already have self-confidence in their teaching ability deliver better instruction and, therefore, receive higher praise from students.
Actions for Universities
Traditionally, faculty development programs focus on teaching techniques to improve student evaluations. However, this study suggests a different approach. Universities can elevate student reactions to their classes by boosting teacher confidence. Schools may still achieve this through traditional training, but they should also consider investments in direct mentorship and personal connections between teachers and administrators so that each teacher can be observed and affirmed with specific, authentic feedback to boost their confidence.
The paper’s conclusion has another implication for how universities hire new teachers. Poor prior student evaluations might not reflect a teacher’s latent talent for teaching but instead a low sense of confidence in ability. If a university administrator believes they can quickly improve a candidate’s under-confidence in any or all of these three areas, the hire might be worth the risk.
The Role of Gender in Teacher Confidence
Our analysis also analyzed the differences between male and female professors in both self-confidence and student evaluations. We found that male professors have higher levels of confidence in all three areas than female professors on average.
Moreover, we found that male professors receive almost 0.1 higher evaluations from students than female professors on a scale of 1 to 5. To put this statistic is starker terms, 83% of students rated a course either a 4 or a 5; only 17% of students rated a course 1, 2, or 3. Thus the effective range for the vast majority of student evaluations is really from 4.0 to 5.0. The difference of 0.1 over an effective range of 1.0 means that male professors on average earn a 10% higher course evaluation than female professors.
There are several possible explanations for this. It is possible that students learn more from male professors than from female professors. After observing our male and female peers in their classrooms over the past 15 years, we find this explanation unlikely. Instead, we suspect that students learn the same amount from male and female professors but have more respect for male professors (in general) than for female professors due to an implicit bias against female leaders with authority. This would be especially pronounced in students from patriarchal cultures, which formed a large proportion of our student sample.
(All 84 professors self-identified as either male or female. None selected other options for gender identification. Because the student evaluations were anonymous, we did not have data to determine if one gender of student was more likely to rate one gender of professor more or less highly. For example, we could not discern if female students rated female professors higher than male students rated the same female professors.)
Both findings are consistent with other studies. Rarely, however, have these findings been seen in the same dataset, which allows us to dig more deeply into the impact of teacher confidence. As depicted in the two charts below, while an increase in the confidence of male teachers does indeed raise student evaluations, the impact is much less dramatic than the increase in evaluations from a rise in the confidence of female professors.
In summarizing the paper’s primary findings above, I noted that self-confidence was correlated to student evaluations “in almost all circumstances.” There is an exception, as shown in the chart below. As male teachers gained confidence in their ability to design their courses, student evaluations surprisingly declined. One way to explain this result is that perhaps overly confident male teachers choose materials that did not align well with student expectations, leading to lower evaluations.
More interesting, an increase in female teachers’ confidence to design a course had the largest impact on student evaluations of any measure we tested. This suggests that this is where university administrators and mentors should focus their attention to most productively increase student evaluations through teacher training.
Resisting Short-Term Optimization
These findings highlight a potential danger in university hiring and promotion. A university that only considers student evaluations will, on average, lean towards hiring and rewarding male professors because they have higher student evaluations on average. While perhaps logical in the short term, this would be detrimental to the university and its students in the long term because it would perpetuate the implicit bias that men are somehow better teachers than women. It would also perpetuate and even depress the already-lower self-confidence of female teachers as they struggle to get hired and promoted.
Our research suggests that interventions to help female teachers elevate their self-confidence, especially in designing course, can lead to higher evaluations of those teachers’ courses, hopefully narrowing the gender gap in student evaluations. Helping male professors improve their self-confidence would also improve evaluations, except in course design, where some humility might be in order. Most importantly, with confident competent teachers of several genders in their classrooms, students will have leaders and role models to help them better prepare for a corporate career working for and with people of all genders.
