Effect of Physical Educators’ Appearance and Sex on Middle School Students’ Learning Outcomes and Perceptions of Teacher Effectiveness

Abstract

Physical Education (PE) teachers can have a great impact on the future physical activity levels of their students, and later, as adults. Professional appearance of teachers has been shown through previous research to have influence on student learning outcomes and perceptions of teacher effectiveness. This research aimed to build on prior studies to investigate the interaction between formal and informal appearance and gender of physical education teachers with middle school student learning outcomes and teacher perspectives. Four 20-minute videos were produced on the non-traditional invasion sport Tchoukball. The four videos consisted of female informal appearance, female formal appearance, male informal appearance, and male formal appearance. The videos were randomly shown to 433 middle school students located in southeastern United States followed by a post-video content examination and a teacher perception survey. Factoral ANOVAs were performed to identify any significant main effects or interactions on overall content exam, two content areas (skill technique and game strategy), and three teacher perspectives (likability, competence, and teacher as a role model). There was no significant main effect for teacher appearance and student learning outcomes. When considering sex of the teacher, there was a significant main effect for overall examination (F(1, 428) = 9.45, p < .001, η2 = .022, 1-β = .866) and for strategies ((F(1, 428) = 17.22, p < .001, η2 = .039, 1-β = .985), while nothing was found for technique-related questions. On the three teacher perspectives, no significance was found between likability and competence, however there was a main effect on the survey questions about teachers as a role model when taking teacher appearance into consideration ((F(1, 424) = 5.01, p < .001, η2 = .025, 1-β = .612).