What to wear? The role of instructor attire on students' perceptions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Instructors’ non-verbal cues play a crucial role in shaping student perceptions, particularly in terms of warmth and competence, two key dimensions that influence trust, engagement, and role modelling in the classroom. One non-verbal cue that instructors have agency over is their choice of attire. Experimental research indicates that formal attire increases perceptions of competence, but at the cost of perceived instructor warmth (Oliver et. al. 2020). However, no research to date has investigated how instructor clothing influences students in an actual classroom, let alone an undergraduate biology classroom. This study employs a quasi-experimental design in which two instructors, each teaching multiple sections of an introductory biology lab taught some sections in casual attire (i.e., jeans and a graphic tee) and others wearing formal attire (i.e., dress pants and a blouse). This attire was maintained across sections for an entire semester. A pre- and post-survey design was used to assess how these manipulated differences in attire influenced students’ perceptions of their instructor upon first impression and at the end of the semester. Outcomes of interest include students’ perception of their instructors’ warmth, competence, and whether they viewed their instructor as a role model. 380 students completed the pre- survey and 316 completed the post-survey. We will present results from ongoing analyses, which include multilevel models testing for an effect of treatment on students’ perceptions of their instructor and for interactions between treatment and student level variables (e.g., students’ gender, ethnicity). By investigating the relationship between instructor attire and these key attributes, this research aims to provide insight into how seemingly small, yet intentional, choices made before class can shape students' perceptions of their instructors and classroom experiences. This research was approved by Research Ethics Boards at Simon Fraser University (REB #30002689) and the University of Guelph (REB #1346).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".