What you don't know can hurt you: students' perceptions of professors' annoying teaching habits

College Student Journal, Sept, 2003 by William M. Miley, Sonia Gonsalves

Faculty members are frequently unaware of their students' perceptions of their teaching. This study was done as an extension of earlier studies to provide this type of feedback to faculty. Data collection consisted of handing out index cards to students on which they were to write anonymously five annoying teaching habits that they noticed in their professors. Undergraduate data from three different institutions were compared. Results indicated that students perceived disorganized teaching, talking too fast for students to process information, lecturing in a monotone voice, and degrading students were professors' most annoying habits. A second study was done to see if students majoring in different fields are annoyed by different teaching habits at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. No specific patterns of annoyance were discerned. Results are discussed in the more general context of a "disconnect" between what faculty perceive as important in the classroom, and what students do.

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Faculty members are frequently unaware of how their students perceive their teaching (Appleby 1990; Perlman and McCann 1998). Students fill out standardized evaluation forms to evaluate faculty who teach them. These forms are submitted to appropriate administrators and a few colleagues and are not shared with others. It has been difficult to share among faculty what students dislike in teaching styles. Different institutions have different dynamics that impact on the teacher-student relationship, but it is likely that there are cross-institutional commonalities as well. Not only do faculty members seem unaware of teaching behaviors that annoy students, but they have misconceptions of what students perceive as good teaching as well. For example, research indicates students want more equality and respect from their professors, whereas faculty frequently believe students want them to control the classroom, to entertain students, to be paragons of virtue, or to be buddies with students (Gorko, Kough, Pignata, Kimmel, and Eison 1994). Gorko et al. contend that these mythical beliefs undermine faculty members' relationships with students.

Trying to determine what teaching behaviors professors and students deem most important can be instructive. Walsh and Maffei (1994) surveyed students at Miami University of Ohio with 46-items on seven-point Likert Scales on the faculty-student relationship. The seven-point scales ranged from whether a particular teaching behavior "greatly enhanced" teaching at one end to "greatly detracted" from teaching at the other end. Of the 14 top behaviors listed as enhancing or detracting on the Likert Scales, professors and students diverged on five of them. Students (but not faculty) listed, "Treats students as equals," "Smiles and displays a friendly demeanor,," "Is accessible outside of office hours," "Greets students encountered outside of class," and "Is available before and after class" as greatly enhancing teaching. Faculty (but not students) listed, "Gives individual attention to students having difficulty," "Applies the same evaluation criteria to all students," Is vague about expectations of students" (greatly detracting from teaching), "Tends to be evasive in responding to questions" (greatly detracting from teaching), and "Explains grading criteria." Notice that professors tended to emphasize the mechanics of the courses they teach, whereas students tended to emphasize social dynamics. However, there are factors that may restrict the generalizability of these findings: 1) the majority (58%) of the sample consisted of female students, but a minority of the faculty were female (35%), and 2) Miami University of Ohio is a large teaching and research university. These findings may not hold for other types of institutions of higher education. Also, there is some suggestion in the literature that female students tend to emphasize interpersonal and social characteristics in professors more than male students do (Smith, Medendorp, Ranck, Morrison, and Kopfman 1994). However limited this research may be, and possibly confounded by gender issues, it suggests professors and students look at the teaching process in somewhat different ways. Further, professors may be unaware of these divergent perceptions.

Appleby (1990) appears to be the earliest to examine classroom complaints by both professors and students by interviewing both constituencies separately. His data found that teachers are most irritated by immature and inattentive students, and that students are most irritated by professors who lack empathy and communicate poorly. Rallis (1994) gathered pertinent information on students' perceptions of professors' annoying teaching habits by simply asking students to write them down anonymously on an index card. This technique allows the entire professorate to see and benefit from the results of the survey. No one's job is threatened, and individual faculty members are not threatened. That is, students name behaviors, and not particular professors. The first part of the study reported here replicated the work of Rallis (1994) with data from Richard Stockton College, and with data obtained by similar methods from two large research universities for comparison.