Understanding the characteristics of effective professors: The student's perspective

Thorsten Gruber, Alexander Reppel, Roediger Voss

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Increasingly, higher education institutions are realising that higher education could be regarded as a business-like service industry and they are beginning to focus more on meeting or even exceeding the needs of their students. Recent research findings suggest that the factors that create student satisfaction with teaching ('teaching satisfiers') may be qualitatively differently from the factors that create dissatisfaction with teaching. Thus, this research uses the Kano methodology to reveal the characteristics of professors that students take for granted ('Must-be factors') and that have the potential to delight them ('Excitement factors'). Kano questionnaires containing 19 attributes of effective professors taken from previous studies and focus group discussions were handed out in two marketing courses to 63 postgraduate students enrolled in a service marketing course. The Kano results corroborate previous US findings that revealed the importance of personality in general and support studies that stress the importance of professors creating rapport with their students in particular. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)175-190
Number of pages15
JournalJournal of Marketing for Higher Education
Volume20
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2010

Keywords

  • Educational services
  • Effective professors
  • Kano methodology
  • Quality attributes
  • Student satisfaction

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