Instructor Fluency Correlates with Students’ Ratings of Their Learning and Their Instructor in an Actual Course

Abstract

The experience of ease or fluency that occurs when learners acquire information is often highly related to their metacognitive judgments of learning for that information. Laboratory-based research indicates that fluency can contribute to students’ overconfident judgments of learning and predictions of future test performance. Such research, however, typically involves artificial learning situations presented for brief periods of time and without a strong investment on the part of the learners. In actual courses, the most likely source of fluency may be instructor fluency: the experience of fluency that stems from content-independent attributes of the instructor and his or her presentation of the information. To examine whether this form of fluency relates to students’ judgments of learning in actual academic courses, we include a measure of instructor fluency in a survey completed by college students (n = 606) answering questions about their course instructors. Students’ content-independent perceptions of instructor fluency (e.g., volume; eye contact) are related to their judgments of learning for the course content, to their ratings of various qualities of the instructor and the course, and to their self-reported interest and motivation in the course. Importantly, these relationships maintain when we control for students’ final grades in the course and despite the fact that students make these ratings at a long temporal delay from the classroom experience. Therefore, much as occurs in the laboratory, students’ metacognitive judgments of their learning and ratings of instructor attributes are related to content independent qualities of their course instructors in actual semester-long courses.