Student perceptions of effective lecturers: the need to recognise the role of ethnicity and choice of discipline

ABSTRACT

University student perceptions of effective teaching have been explored in previous studies, however, research is lacking regarding how perceptions of teaching efficacy vary by ethnicity and programme of study. In this study, student perceptions of effective teaching are explored between STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and non-STEM major students of four ethnic groups: Europeans, Asians, Māori, and Pasifika. The study sample comprised 2073 students from a New Zealand university who completed a survey in 2016. Firstly, the findings indicated that non-STEM major students were more likely to report culturally knowledgeable as an important characteristic compared to STEM major students. Secondly, the distribution referring to content knowledgeable, creative, culturally knowledgeable, and passionate as characteristics of effective teaching was different between the four ethnic groups. In detail, Europeans and Māori were more likely to refer to content knowledgeable than Pasifika students, while Pasifika students were more likely to refer to culturally knowledgeable compared to Europeans. Furthermore, the highest percentage of referring to creative as a characteristic of effective teaching was for Asians, and the highest percentage of referring to passionate was for Māori students. The findings imply that lecturers should be well informed about these differences to be able to improve the quality of their teaching and student learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Effective teaching
• student perceptions
• ethnicity
• STEM
• Pasifika
• Māori

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Farzad Radmehr http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0592-9148

John Overton http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9080-9510

Notes

1 The indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand.

2 Pasifika refer to people whose ancestors are from Polynesian, Melanesian, and Micronesian nations of the Pacific Ocean.

3 In this section, instructor refers to both teachers and lecturers.

4 Teaching that students actively construct knowledge and the teacher considers as a facilitator, not the dispenser of knowledge (Baeten, Dochy, Struyven, Parmentier, & Vanderbruggen, 2016).

5 It is not clear how the multiple ethnicities were compressed to a single category by the university, however, in the Aotearoa/New Zealand context, by far the most common multiple identities involve mixed Māori-Europeans, Pasifika-Europeans or Māori-Pasifika-Europeans. It is common practice (as in eligibility for the Māori electoral role) in these cases that any level of Māori (or Pasifika) self-identification results in classification as ‘Māori’ (or Pasifika). We have assumed confidently, therefore, that the university would have classified any student as ‘Māori’ if they self-identified any one of their ethnicities as Māori.