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Abstract Title: Quantifying professors’ effect on student grades
Abstract: In this work, we gauge the effect different lecturers have on student grades. To do this we extract student grades in introductory physics courses as well as ethnicity, gender, high school GPA and math placement scores from the registrar data of a large Midwestern university. We match the course data to instructors over a period from 2002 to 2017, yielding a data set with 864 observations. We build three different linear models, taking into account different effects and controls in order to quantify the impact individual lecturers have on student grades. We find statistically significant difference of more than half a grade that is directly attributable to the lecturers student's had in a course. Moreover, significant effects associated with genders and ethnic groups are generally lower than effects associated with lecturers. We see an increased gender grade difference when we sub-categorize students taught by individual lecturers into genders.
Abstract Type: Contributed Poster Presentation
Session Time: Poster Session III
Poster Number: 3.M4

Author/Organizer Information

Primary Contact: Sebastian Gregorius Winther-Larsen
Department of Physics and Center of Computing in Science Education, University of Oslo
Oslo, 0273
Phone: +4790132437
Co-Author(s)
and Co-Presenter(s)
John M. Aiken
Department of Physics and Center for Computing in Science Education, University of Oslo

Marcos D. Caballero
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering, and CREATE for STEM Institute, Michigan State University and;
Department of Physics and Center for Computing in Science Education, University of Oslo