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The Influence of Student, Course, and Instructor Characteristics in Evaluations of University Teaching

This study examined the relationship between student evaluations and a set of 16 background characteristics (e.g., class size, expected grade, reason for taking course, etc). Class average responses in 511 undergraduate courses taught by a total of 221 different instructors were analyzed. Each separate background variable generally explained less than 5 percent of the variance in any one student evaluation score, and there was little nonlinearity in any of these bivariate relationships. Several different multivariate analyses each suggested that 12 to 14 percent of the variance in the student ratings could be explained by the entire set of 16 background variables. Four background variables were most influential: more favorable ratings were correlated with higher Prior Subject Interest, higher Expected Grades, higher levels of Workload/Difficulty, and a higher percentage of students taking the course for General Interest Only. A path analysis demonstrated that students’ Prior Subject Interest had the strongest impact on student ratings, and that this variable also accounted for about one-third of the relationship between Expected Grades and student ratings.