 Why do good performing students highly rate their instructors? Evidence from a natural experimentDonghun Cho, Wonyoung Baek and Joonmo Cho Economics of Education Review, 2015, vol. 49, issue C, 172-179 Abstract: This article analyzes the behavior of students in a college classroom with regard to their evaluation of teacher performance. As some students are randomly able to see their grades prior to the evaluation, the “natural” experiment provides a unique opportunity for testing the hypothesis as to whether there exists a possibility of a hedonic (implicit) exchange between the students’ grades and teaching evaluations. Students with good grades tend to highly rate the teaching quality of their instructors, in comparison with those who receive relatively poor grades. This study finds that students with better grades than their expected grades provide a psychological “gift” to their teachers by giving a higher teacher evaluation, whereas it is the opposite with those students receiving lower grades than their expectation. These empirical results demonstrate that a previous interpretation on the effect of student grades in an incumbent course with regard to the teaching quality may have to be somewhat discounted. Keywords: Teaching quality; Student evaluation; Student grade; Hedonic value of grade surplus; Psychological reward-penalty (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:49:y:2015:i:c:p:172-179 DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2015.10.001 Access Statistics for this article Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.