Who teaches economics courses better?: using student–professor matched data for the principle of economics course

Abstract

This study investigates the influences on student evaluation of teaching of the principle of economics course using the student–professor matched data, which combines students’ course evaluations and professors’ research performance. The results indicated that professors with better research performance, majored in applied rather than theoretical economics and using global standard textbooks received higher course evaluations than otherwise.

Keywords:

• student teaching evaluation
• economics course
• student–professor matched data
• research performance

JEL Classification:

• A10
• A22

Notes

¹ Some researchers have found that female instructors are rated lower than their male colleagues (Basow and Silberg, 1987), whereas other researchers were unable to find evidence of gender differences (Goodwin and Stevens, 1993).

² The relation between research productivity and teaching performance of the faculty has been for years at the core of strong debate concerning the design of universities all over the world. Empirical research does not establish anything close to a stylized fact, as it also provides mixed evidence. Noser et al. (1996) differentiate the effect of research depending on the level of the courses taught. Shin (2011) finds different signs depending on the indicator used for research productivity. Aurora et al. (2012) portrayed that the quality of university teaching is positively affected by published research. That is, usual amounts of research are positive for teaching, whereas high research output may hinder the teaching quality.

³ The SET is normally conducted via online after students complete their final examination. Students have to answer a set of teaching evaluation questionnaires if they want to check their final exam grades prior to receiving a formal transcript by mail. Therefore, the response rate for SET is usually higher than 90%, because most students wish to find out their grades as soon as possible.

⁴ The research performance variable in this study consists of International A (100%), International B (50%), Domestic A (30%), Domestic B (10%) and Domestic other grades (5%) from the period 2007 to 2011. The values of the variable are calculated by assigning different weights to the grades of the domestic and international journals in which the papers are published. The international journals are those listed in the Science Citation Index (SCI), SCI Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI); the domestic journal articles are those listed by the Korean Research Foundation.

⁵ In case the dependent variable (SET) is considered as a count variable, we conduct the negative binominal regression method instead of OLS. The results are similar to the OLS results. See Table A1 in the ‘Appendix’ section for the more detailed negative binominal regression results.

⁶ Unlike universities in the United States which perform a tenure review based on research performance, Korean universities perform a faculty tenure review based on the specified period and the principles in the Education Law. In order to be promoted from an assistant professor to an associate professor to a tenured professor, professors need to teach and research for 6 years, and various criteria such as research performance and course evaluation set by each university should be met before promotion. Therefore, it is determined that there is no multicollinearity problem between the faculty rank variable (full-time professor, associate professor) and the research performance variable, which are used as an explanatory variable in this study.

⁷ This study revealed that the experience variable coefficient was a negative value (–) in all models, indicating that longer experience is associated with lower course evaluation scores. The positive value (+) of the coefficient for the interaction term of experiencefield (applied = 1) indicates that unlike professors who specialized in theoretical economics, professors specialized in applied economics receive better course evaluations over time, which can be interpreted that longer research experience in the field enables more effective delivery of practical knowledge to students. Also, see Cho et al. (2013b) for detailed interpretation on interaction term.