Despite the demonstrated reliability and validity of the Teacher Behavior Checklist (TBC) as a tool for evaluating postsecondary instructors, research has yet to consider the impact of student, instructor, and course factors on TBC ratings. Additionally, it is unknown whether different evaluation sources converge when the TBC is used. This study…

Teachers of psychology tend to agree that learning about diversity is an important goal for undergraduate psychology courses. There is significantly less agreement about what aspects of diversity psychology students should understand. The current research proposes and investigates two potentially distinct ways students might understand diversity:…

One method to increase flexibility in class offerings is through the use of compressed courses, classes that have the same number of contact hours but over a shorter time period (e.g., 8 weeks vs. 15 weeks). Before offering these courses, it is important to determine whether they lead to equivalent or better student outcomes. This study examined…

Recent research suggests that designing a syllabus using learner-centered principles may increase students' perceptions of their instructor on the characteristics of rapport, caring, helpfulness, willingness to seek help from the instructor, and student motivation. Typically, a learner-centered syllabus is one that presents a positive tone at the…

The ability to distinguish between correlational and causal claims is core knowledge for scientific literacy. News reports of scientific research prominently feature these claims. Thus, this knowledge has significant real-world application, and distinguishing among claims is critical to making sense of the reported research. We constructed an…

Teaching effectiveness is often evaluated through student ratings of instruction (SRI). Research suggests that there are many potential factors that can predict student's perceptions of teaching effectiveness such as professor-student rapport, student engagement, and perceived humor of the instructor. Therefore, we sought to assess whether…

Students' course evaluations often play an important role in career advancement for faculty. The authors examined the association between attachment representations of parents and course evaluations in a sample of 230 undergraduate students. They found a significant negative association between attachment anxiety with parents and course…

The perceived relation between assigned student grades and instructor evaluations of teaching has been the subject of much debate, though few laboratory studies have been conducted with adequate controls. Marsh and Roche suggested that experimental field studies may be a particularly promising avenue for further analyses of this relation. The…

A review of prior research on the role of attendance policies in large lecture classes (including psychology) is presented. This research showed that although students often did not attend class, various policies were effective in getting students to the classroom. Moreover, some research showed that an attendance policy did not lower instructor…

This article describes a classroom activity to demonstrate (dis)agreement in personality judgments, using an exercise derived from Watson's research on the accuracy of rating strangers' personalities. On the first day of class, undergraduate students in psychology courses rated their own personality and the personality of a classmate, using items…

Introductory psychology students at a technical college, 2-year community college, and a regional university rated how important textbook chapters or topics were to them now and in the future and how interesting they were. Importance and interest ratings were highly correlated, and the whole course was rated of greater importance and interest than…

Incorporating realistic data and research examples into quantitative (e.g., statistics and research methods) courses has been widely recommended for enhancing student engagement and comprehension. One way to achieve these ends is to use a data generator to emulate the data in published research articles. "MorseGen" is a free data generator that…

Group projects are often used in psychology courses to prepare students for future collaborative work. However, psychology alumni report that their education did not adequately prepare them for collaborative work. To better understand these perceptions, this study examined how instructor contributions (involvement and evaluation techniques)…

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.…

Previous research has linked teachers' physical attractiveness and students' evaluations of teaching. We expanded on this literature by using data from RateMyProfessors.com (RMP), a database popular among college students. Additionally, we examined the unique variance that physical attractiveness explains in student evaluations of teaching while…