Business Student Perceptions of Favourite and Effective Instructors: Do They Differ?

Introduction In 1953, Dale Camegie published one of the first modem 'self-help' books, entitled "How to win friends and influence people". The purpose of this note is to question whether Irish business students require their instructors to act on the precepts of Mr. Carnegie. Specifically, do they distinguish between the attributes of instructors that they like (favourites) and those that they perceive to be effective? The quality of student learning and the effectiveness of teaching are ultimately unobservable, the learning process internal to the student, the teaching process a continually changing and evolving set of actions, and the interaction between them complex. Different students may perceive the same instructor as being effective and ineffective. A magnetic and outgoing personality may well, on its own, promote a learning atmosphere and thus lead to substantial student learning even though the technical effectiveness of the pedagogic process involved may not be high. Recognising this, this study does not attempt to investigate the extent or otherwise of student learning processes. Instead, it looks at what students perceive as being the attributes of effective and popular instructors. Previous Research Research in the 1970s by Gurney (1977) indicated that students place a high value on the human and process elements of teaching, notjust on the information content. Abrami etal. (1982) show that students respond notjust to the content but also to the personality of the instructor. Other studies (Cohen 1981, Murray et al. 1990, and Centra 1977) also indicate that students judge their instructors' ability to communicate the material on the basis of personality issues as well as on the basis of the instructors' professional ability. These studies have amounted to little more than assertion that there is correlation, the causal implication being unsaid. Gibbs (1992) defines some of the attributes of good teaching as including: providing interesting and stimulating instruction; encouragement of students independence; maintaining a respectful attitude to students; provision of high quality and rapid feedback on student work; and the fostering of active learning methods. A major study by Atamian and Ganguli (1993) threw up a number of interesting findings. They surveyed accounting majors, finding that in general, those surveyed distinguished between effective and popular instructors. This discrimination was stronger in male rather than female students. Male and female students used the same attributes to describe effective instructors, and use the same set to define favourite instructors (different attribute sets overall of course, given the overall finding). This study forms the basis of the present work Methodology Three distinct groups of business students were surveyed. The first group was MBA students. It is interesting to note that no MBA student actually ticked the identity box and as such it is not possible identify MBA Students as such. The second group was students pursuing an evening degree in Business and Information Technology, all over the age of 23 and in full-time employment. The third group was full-time undergraduate Business students, in age lying typically between 19 and 21 and almost all availing of fee waivers from government. Each student was given one of two forms. Form A asked students to recall their (unnamed) favourite instructor, and to mark those 5 attributes that they felt best defined this person and whether they considered this person to have also been the most effective instructor. Form B asked students to indicate the attributes that best described the person that they remembered as being their most effective instructor and whether they considered this person to have been their favourite. The attribute set was generated by reference to previous studies, by reference to Gibbs and by a series of discussions with experienced colleagues. …