Shocking News from Academia

That's shocking mostly in a Claude-Rains-in-Casablanca sort of sense ("I am shocked--shocked!"), but there are a couple of stories in Inside Higher Ed this morning presenting new findings that seem like they ought to be really obvious.

The first is a new study of the University of California system that finds that different majors are different:

Among the 58,000 undergraduates on eight campuses who participated in the survey, students who majored in the social sciences and humanities reported higher levels of satisfaction with their undergraduate education over all as well as better skills in critical thinking, communication, cultural appreciation and social awareness.

Students majoring in engineering, business, mathematics and computer science, meanwhile, reported more collaborative learning and demonstrated better mathematical skills. Engineering majors, as well as biological and physical science majors, also reported spending more time preparing for and attending classes.

This shouldn't be a surprise to any scientist who has ever discussed teaching with a colleague in the humanities. The disciplines are very different, and different techniques are required to teach students to analyze literature than are required to teach students to analyze the chemical composition of mysterious white powders found in the stock room.

This finding has some fairly significant implications, though, particularly given the recent vogue for "Assessment" and a push for high-stakes testing in higher education. If the variance between majors at the same institution is larger than the variation between institutions for the same major, that makes it difficult to do institutional-level comparisons between schools. And, as the authors point out in the article, it means that the composition of a school can have a huge impact on its apparent rating based on national surveys. If humanities majors are systematically happier than engineers, then a school with an engineering program will automatically appear to be doing worse than one without engineering.

The other story has to do with the effect of faculty gender on student performance. Specifically, there isn't one:

The data revealed that students taught by instructors of their same sex were overall about one percentage point less likely to drop a course than their counterparts who took courses with professors of the opposite sex. For females, though, the authors estimate no significant difference in the likelihood of dropping a class based on whether the instructor was male or female.

Male students performed slightly better, on average, with a male instructor (in what translates to a 0.6 percentage point increase in expected grade out of 100 percent) than they did with a female instructor. With women, on the other hand, gender of the professor appeared not to matter.

The research also found no important influence from the so-called "role model effect," which measures whether a same-sex instructor would motivate a student to take a subsequent course in his or her field.

OK, maybe that doesn't seem obvious. It certainly didn't seem obvious to one of the co-authors, who is quoted as saying "We were more surprised with these findings than we would have been if the results showed that gender had a large effect in the classroom." So why am I not surprised? Well, this paragraph has something to do with it:

One of the paper's co-authors, Philip Oreopoulos, who teaches economics at Toronto and is a research associate at NBER, said the authors limited their research to large introductory courses where instructors don't grade exams and students typically have little interaction with faculty. That way, the results would be likelier to reflect how gender factored into the equation, as opposed to how well a student got to know a faculty member or what type of reputation an instructor had earned with higher-level students.

So, in other words, in classes where students don't have much interaction with the professor, the personal characteristics of the professor don't have a large effect on student performance.

I am shocked-- shocked!-- by this result. Really. Really I am.