Faculty Scholarship Has a Profound Positive Association With Student Evaluations of Teaching—Except When It Doesn’t

Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that research-productive faculty are also the finest instructors. But, is this commonly held belief correct? In the current study, the notion that faculty scholarship exhibits a positive association with teaching evaluations is investigated. Reflecting the data structure of faculty nested within university, the current study uses hierarchical linear modeling, and finds that scholarship displays a positive correspondence with teaching evaluations, but only for male faculty publishing in elite or top-tier marketing journals. Although this linkage is only found under specific conditions, it stands in contrast to much of the extant literature, which reports little to no correlation between research and teaching evaluations. In addition, significant control variables and interactions, at both the faculty level (i.e., gender, faculty title) and university level (i.e., tuition, entry GPA, flagship university), are identified. In total, the findings suggest that while there is an association between elite publications and student evaluations, the primacy of research in the academy may, nonetheless, not always be in the best interest of students.