Presenter: Ashley Hale, College of Life Sciences, Biology
Authors: Hale A, Bailey EG
Faculty Advisor: Liz Bailey, College of Life Sciences, Biology
Institution: Brigham Young University
Regardless of instructors’ level of education or preferred title, many university STEM instructors experience variability in how their students address them. This variability could be due to students’ lack of knowledge of appropriate titles, their means of expressing respect or disrespect based on personal attitudes towards a particular professor, or even just speaking in concordance with contemporary vernacular that students are accustomed to using in everyday communications. Physical attributes, such as race, attractiveness, gender, and age may also affect the titles students use to refer to their professors. Our study focuses on whether the gender and age of instructors are predictive of what titles they are called in online reviews. In order to evaluate this, we used student ratings of life science instructors at universities across the United States on Ratemyprofessors.com, a popular teacher-rating website utilized among college students. This public forum gives students an opportunity to express opinions about instructors on an anonymous platform, creating a high level of openness and immunity. Thus, students are able to refer to their professors in whatever way is most comfortable or suitable for them personally. We collected student rating data for life science instructors from 21 schools in 7 states across the nation to compare trends in these titles between liberal and conservative populations. For every public/liberal university we selected in each state, we also selected a private/conservative counterpart for comparison. We coded every student comment for any title used (e.g. Doctor, Professor, first or last name). For characteristics of instructors, we used online use of pronouns for gender identity and year of terminal degree to estimate age. We will evaluate differences in the way life sciences instructors are addressed based on gender, age, degree, student-assessed quality and difficulty, and we will investigate differences between more liberal versus conservative populations.