Student Evaluations of Teachers: An Examination of the Effect of Sex and Field of Study

s tenure and promotion become critical in academia, it is no surprise that more attention is being paid to the process of reaching decisions in these areas. One area of performance, the classroom, has often been evaluated by students' assessments of teaching performance. Many schools utilize national evaluation instruments; others have formulated questionnaires appropriate for their specific uses. Although there has been some attention to the academic factors affecting these evaluations, such as class size and level of the course (Linsky and Straus, 1973; Centra, 1979), less attention has been paid to the personal factors, such as the sex of those being evaluated. Research indicates that in this society certain characteristics or personality traits are expected to accompany the physical state of being male or female. Recently, sex roles and their accompanying personality traits have been studied extensively (McKee and Sheriffs, 1957; Goldberg, 1968; Pheterson, Kiesler and Goldberg, 1971; Broverman et al., 1972; Bem, 1974). As an oversimplification, females are generally expected to be more emotional,