Many college courses conclude by giving students the opportunity to evaluate the course and the instructor anonymously. However, the use of these student evaluations as an indicator of course quality and teaching effectiveness is often criticized because these measures may reflect the influence of non-teaching related characteristics, such as the physical appearance of the instructor. The article titled, “Beauty in the classroom: instructors’ pulchritude and putative pedagogical productivity” by Hamermesh and Parker found that instructors who are viewed to be better looking receive higher instructional ratings.
Here, you will analyze the data from this study in order to learn what goes into a positive professor evaluation.
In this lab, you will explore and visualize the data using the tidyverse suite of packages. The data can be found in the companion package for OpenIntro resources, openintro.
Let’s load the packages.
library(tidyverse)
library(openintro)
library(GGally)
## Warning: package 'GGally' was built under R version 4.0.3
This is the first time we’re using the GGally package. You will be using the ggpairs function from this package later in the lab.
To create your new lab report, in RStudio, go to New File -> R Markdown… Then, choose From Template and then choose Lab Report for OpenIntro Statistics Labs from the list of templates.
The data were gathered from end of semester student evaluations for a large sample of professors from the University of Texas at Austin. In addition, six students rated the professors’ physical appearance. The result is a data frame where each row contains a different course and columns represent variables about the courses and professors. It’s called evals.
glimpse(evals)
## Rows: 463
## Columns: 23
## $ course_id <int> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16...
## $ prof_id <int> 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 5,...
## $ score <dbl> 4.7, 4.1, 3.9, 4.8, 4.6, 4.3, 2.8, 4.1, 3.4, 4.5, 3.8...
## $ rank <fct> tenure track, tenure track, tenure track, tenure trac...
## $ ethnicity <fct> minority, minority, minority, minority, not minority,...
## $ gender <fct> female, female, female, female, male, male, male, mal...
## $ language <fct> english, english, english, english, english, english,...
## $ age <int> 36, 36, 36, 36, 59, 59, 59, 51, 51, 40, 40, 40, 40, 4...
## $ cls_perc_eval <dbl> 55.81395, 68.80000, 60.80000, 62.60163, 85.00000, 87....
## $ cls_did_eval <int> 24, 86, 76, 77, 17, 35, 39, 55, 111, 40, 24, 24, 17, ...
## $ cls_students <int> 43, 125, 125, 123, 20, 40, 44, 55, 195, 46, 27, 25, 2...
## $ cls_level <fct> upper, upper, upper, upper, upper, upper, upper, uppe...
## $ cls_profs <fct> single, single, single, single, multiple, multiple, m...
## $ cls_credits <fct> multi credit, multi credit, multi credit, multi credi...
## $ bty_f1lower <int> 5, 5, 5, 5, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 7,...
## $ bty_f1upper <int> 7, 7, 7, 7, 4, 4, 4, 2, 2, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 9,...
## $ bty_f2upper <int> 6, 6, 6, 6, 2, 2, 2, 5, 5, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 9,...
## $ bty_m1lower <int> 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 7,...
## $ bty_m1upper <int> 4, 4, 4, 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 6,...
## $ bty_m2upper <int> 6, 6, 6, 6, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 6,...
## $ bty_avg <dbl> 5.000, 5.000, 5.000, 5.000, 3.000, 3.000, 3.000, 3.33...
## $ pic_outfit <fct> not formal, not formal, not formal, not formal, not f...
## $ pic_color <fct> color, color, color, color, color, color, color, colo...
We have observations on 21 different variables, some categorical and some numerical. The meaning of each variable can be found by bringing up the help file:
?evals
## starting httpd help server ... done
This is an observational study. No experiment were set-up. The observations were gathered by end of class evaluations and questionnaire answered by 6 students pertaining on the beauty assessment of the professors. Because this is not an experiment, we cannot conclude casual relationship.
score. Is the distribution skewed? What does that tell you about how students rate courses? Is this what you expected to see? Why, or why not? hist(evals$score)
The distribution of ‘score’ is skewed to the left, with the majority of the observations with score of between 4 and 5. This is as expected, most students will provide feedback with positive evaluation.
score, select two other variables and describe their relationship with each other using an appropriate visualization.boxplot(evals$cls_students ~ evals$gender)
With visualization of the side-by-side boxplot, it does not seem to be a relationship between the class size of students and gender.It looks like male professor had more students, or there is more male professor versus female ones.
The fundamental phenomenon suggested by the study is that better looking teachers are evaluated more favorably. Let’s create a scatterplot to see if this appears to be the case:
ggplot(data = evals, aes(x = bty_avg, y = score)) +
geom_point()
Before you draw conclusions about the trend, compare the number of observations in the data frame with the approximate number of points on the scatterplot. Is anything awry?
geom_jitter as your layer. What was misleading about the initial scatterplot? Lots of points have the same values for (x,y). There could not be differentiated on the scatter plot. As less points is added on the score variable(y),the points can be differentiated. So instead of 250 points, all 463 points are visible.ggplot(data = evals, aes(x = bty_avg, y = score)) +
geom_jitter()
plot(jitter(evals$score) ~ evals$bty_avg)
m_bty to predict average professor score by average beauty rating. Write out the equation for the linear model and interpret the slope. Is average beauty score a statistically significant predictor? Does it appear to be a practically significant predictor?Add the line of the bet fit model to your plot using the following:
ggplot(data = evals, aes(x = bty_avg, y = score)) +
geom_jitter() +
geom_smooth(method = "lm")
## `geom_smooth()` using formula 'y ~ x'
The blue line is the model. The shaded gray area around the line tells you about the variability you might expect in your predictions. To turn that off, use se = FALSE.
ggplot(data = evals, aes(x = bty_avg, y = score)) +
geom_jitter() +
geom_smooth(method = "lm", se = FALSE)
## `geom_smooth()` using formula 'y ~ x'
m_bty <- lm(evals$score ~ evals$bty_avg)
plot(jitter(evals$score,factor=1.2) ~ jitter(evals$bty_avg,factor=1.2))
abline(m_bty)
summary(m_bty)
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = evals$score ~ evals$bty_avg)
##
## Residuals:
## Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
## -1.9246 -0.3690 0.1420 0.3977 0.9309
##
## Coefficients:
## Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) 3.88034 0.07614 50.96 < 2e-16 ***
## evals$bty_avg 0.06664 0.01629 4.09 5.08e-05 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 0.5348 on 461 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared: 0.03502, Adjusted R-squared: 0.03293
## F-statistic: 16.73 on 1 and 461 DF, p-value: 5.083e-05
Linear Model Equation: y-hat = 3.88034+ 0.06664(bty_avg) —> this means that for every single count increase in bty_avg, the score increases by 0.6664. Though the average beauty score does appear to be a significant predictor, the model has a very low R-squared value, which implies that this model is not appropriate for the data. As such, beauty average may not be a practically significant predictor. 6. Use residual plots to evaluate whether the conditions of least squares regression are reasonable. Provide plots and comments for each one (see the Simple Regression Lab for a reminder of how to make these).
hist(m_bty$residuals)
plot(x=m_bty$residuals, y=evals$bty_avg)
abline(h = 0, lty = 3)
The residuals are not normally distributed (left skewed) and, though the residuals do not appear to have a somewhat constant spread, they are not concentrated around the zero line. The conditions are not being met.
The data set contains several variables on the beauty score of the professor: individual ratings from each of the six students who were asked to score the physical appearance of the professors and the average of these six scores. Let’s take a look at the relationship between one of these scores and the average beauty score.
ggplot(data = evals, aes(x = bty_f1lower, y = bty_avg)) +
geom_point()
evals %>%
summarise(cor(bty_avg, bty_f1lower))
## # A tibble: 1 x 1
## `cor(bty_avg, bty_f1lower)`
## <dbl>
## 1 0.844
As expected, the relationship is quite strong—after all, the average score is calculated using the individual scores. You can actually look at the relationships between all beauty variables (columns 13 through 19) using the following command:
evals %>%
select(contains("bty")) %>%
ggpairs()
These variables are collinear (correlated), and adding more than one of these variables to the model would not add much value to the model. In this application and with these highly-correlated predictors, it is reasonable to use the average beauty score as the single representative of these variables.
In order to see if beauty is still a significant predictor of professor score after you’ve accounted for the professor’s gender, you can add the gender term into the model.
m_bty_gen <- lm(score ~ bty_avg + gender, data = evals)
summary(m_bty_gen)
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = score ~ bty_avg + gender, data = evals)
##
## Residuals:
## Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
## -1.8305 -0.3625 0.1055 0.4213 0.9314
##
## Coefficients:
## Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) 3.74734 0.08466 44.266 < 2e-16 ***
## bty_avg 0.07416 0.01625 4.563 6.48e-06 ***
## gendermale 0.17239 0.05022 3.433 0.000652 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 0.5287 on 460 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared: 0.05912, Adjusted R-squared: 0.05503
## F-statistic: 14.45 on 2 and 460 DF, p-value: 8.177e-07
m_bty_gen = lm(score ~ bty_avg + gender, data = evals)
qqnorm(m_bty_gen$residuals)
qqline(m_bty_gen$residuals)
plot(m_bty_gen$residuals)
abline(h = 0, lty = 3)
We can assume independence based on the assumption that students do not have courses with more than one teacher. As for the qq-plot, most data falls along the normal line, however towards the upper end, the points curve off a bit but not enough to assume non-normality. The plotted residuals are spread along the zero line with no apparent pattern. The conditions for this model are met.
bty_avg still a significant predictor of score? Has the addition of gender to the model changed the parameter estimate for bty_avg?Note that the estimate for gender is now called gendermale. You’ll see this name change whenever you introduce a categorical variable. The reason is that R recodes gender from having the values of male and female to being an indicator variable called gendermale that takes a value of \(0\) for female professors and a value of \(1\) for male professors. (Such variables are often referred to as “dummy” variables.)
As a result, for female professors, the parameter estimate is multiplied by zero, leaving the intercept and slope form familiar from simple regression.
\[ \begin{aligned} \widehat{score} &= \hat{\beta}_0 + \hat{\beta}_1 \times bty\_avg + \hat{\beta}_2 \times (0) \\ &= \hat{\beta}_0 + \hat{\beta}_1 \times bty\_avg\end{aligned} \]
summary(m_bty_gen)
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = score ~ bty_avg + gender, data = evals)
##
## Residuals:
## Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
## -1.8305 -0.3625 0.1055 0.4213 0.9314
##
## Coefficients:
## Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) 3.74734 0.08466 44.266 < 2e-16 ***
## bty_avg 0.07416 0.01625 4.563 6.48e-06 ***
## gendermale 0.17239 0.05022 3.433 0.000652 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 0.5287 on 460 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared: 0.05912, Adjusted R-squared: 0.05503
## F-statistic: 14.45 on 2 and 460 DF, p-value: 8.177e-07
Yes, bty_avg is still a significant predictor of score and adding the gender variable to the model has changed the parameter estimate for bty_avg (increased it from 0.06664 to 0.07416), but not significantly. However, the R-square is still very low for this model, so there is a chance that a more significant predictor is added to the model, score may not be significant at that point.
The decision to call the indicator variable gendermale instead of genderfemale has no deeper meaning. R simply codes the category that comes first alphabetically as a \(0\). (You can change the reference level of a categorical variable, which is the level that is coded as a 0, using therelevel() function. Use ?relevel to learn more.)
m_bty_rank with gender removed and rank added in. How does R appear to handle categorical variables that have more than two levels? Note that the rank variable has three levels: teaching, tenure track, tenured.m_bty_rank = lm(score ~ bty_avg + rank, data = evals)
summary(m_bty_rank)
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = score ~ bty_avg + rank, data = evals)
##
## Residuals:
## Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
## -1.8713 -0.3642 0.1489 0.4103 0.9525
##
## Coefficients:
## Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) 3.98155 0.09078 43.860 < 2e-16 ***
## bty_avg 0.06783 0.01655 4.098 4.92e-05 ***
## ranktenure track -0.16070 0.07395 -2.173 0.0303 *
## ranktenured -0.12623 0.06266 -2.014 0.0445 *
## ---
## Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 0.5328 on 459 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared: 0.04652, Adjusted R-squared: 0.04029
## F-statistic: 7.465 on 3 and 459 DF, p-value: 6.88e-05
The estimate for bty_avg reflects how much higher a group of professors is expected to score if they have a beauty rating that is one point higher while holding all other variables constant. In this case, that shows that considering only professors of the same rank with bty_avg scores that are one point apart
The interpretation of the coefficients in multiple regression is slightly different from that of simple regression. The estimate for bty_avg reflects how much higher a group of professors is expected to score if they have a beauty rating that is one point higher while holding all other variables constant. In this case, that translates into considering only professors of the same rank with bty_avg scores that are one point apart.
We will start with a full model that predicts professor score based on rank, gender, ethnicity, language of the university where they got their degree, age, proportion of students that filled out evaluations, class size, course level, number of professors, number of credits, average beauty rating, outfit, and picture color.
Let’s run the model…
m_full <- lm(score ~ rank + gender + ethnicity + language + age + cls_perc_eval
+ cls_students + cls_level + cls_profs + cls_credits + bty_avg
+ pic_outfit + pic_color, data = evals)
summary(m_full)
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = score ~ rank + gender + ethnicity + language + age +
## cls_perc_eval + cls_students + cls_level + cls_profs + cls_credits +
## bty_avg + pic_outfit + pic_color, data = evals)
##
## Residuals:
## Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
## -1.77397 -0.32432 0.09067 0.35183 0.95036
##
## Coefficients:
## Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) 4.0952141 0.2905277 14.096 < 2e-16 ***
## ranktenure track -0.1475932 0.0820671 -1.798 0.07278 .
## ranktenured -0.0973378 0.0663296 -1.467 0.14295
## gendermale 0.2109481 0.0518230 4.071 5.54e-05 ***
## ethnicitynot minority 0.1234929 0.0786273 1.571 0.11698
## languagenon-english -0.2298112 0.1113754 -2.063 0.03965 *
## age -0.0090072 0.0031359 -2.872 0.00427 **
## cls_perc_eval 0.0053272 0.0015393 3.461 0.00059 ***
## cls_students 0.0004546 0.0003774 1.205 0.22896
## cls_levelupper 0.0605140 0.0575617 1.051 0.29369
## cls_profssingle -0.0146619 0.0519885 -0.282 0.77806
## cls_creditsone credit 0.5020432 0.1159388 4.330 1.84e-05 ***
## bty_avg 0.0400333 0.0175064 2.287 0.02267 *
## pic_outfitnot formal -0.1126817 0.0738800 -1.525 0.12792
## pic_colorcolor -0.2172630 0.0715021 -3.039 0.00252 **
## ---
## Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 0.498 on 448 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared: 0.1871, Adjusted R-squared: 0.1617
## F-statistic: 7.366 on 14 and 448 DF, p-value: 6.552e-14
Check your suspicions from the previous exercise. Include the model output in your response. The “number of professors” (cls_profs) as the variable to have the least association with the professor’s evaluation score. That has the maximum p-value(0.77806)
Interpret the coefficient associated with the ethnicity variable. All other things being equal, Evaluation for professor that not minority tends to be 0.1234929 higher.
Drop the variable with the highest p-value and re-fit the model. Did the coefficients and significance of the other explanatory variables change? (One of the things that makes multiple regression interesting is that coefficient estimates depend on the other variables that are included in the model.) If not, what does this say about whether or not the dropped variable was collinear with the other explanatory variables?
refit_model <- lm(score ~ rank + ethnicity + gender + language + age + cls_perc_eval
+ cls_students + cls_level + cls_credits + bty_avg
+ pic_outfit + pic_color, data = evals)
summary(refit_model)
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = score ~ rank + ethnicity + gender + language + age +
## cls_perc_eval + cls_students + cls_level + cls_credits +
## bty_avg + pic_outfit + pic_color, data = evals)
##
## Residuals:
## Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
## -1.7836 -0.3257 0.0859 0.3513 0.9551
##
## Coefficients:
## Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) 4.0872523 0.2888562 14.150 < 2e-16 ***
## ranktenure track -0.1476746 0.0819824 -1.801 0.072327 .
## ranktenured -0.0973829 0.0662614 -1.470 0.142349
## ethnicitynot minority 0.1274458 0.0772887 1.649 0.099856 .
## gendermale 0.2101231 0.0516873 4.065 5.66e-05 ***
## languagenon-english -0.2282894 0.1111305 -2.054 0.040530 *
## age -0.0089992 0.0031326 -2.873 0.004262 **
## cls_perc_eval 0.0052888 0.0015317 3.453 0.000607 ***
## cls_students 0.0004687 0.0003737 1.254 0.210384
## cls_levelupper 0.0606374 0.0575010 1.055 0.292200
## cls_creditsone credit 0.5061196 0.1149163 4.404 1.33e-05 ***
## bty_avg 0.0398629 0.0174780 2.281 0.023032 *
## pic_outfitnot formal -0.1083227 0.0721711 -1.501 0.134080
## pic_colorcolor -0.2190527 0.0711469 -3.079 0.002205 **
## ---
## Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 0.4974 on 449 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared: 0.187, Adjusted R-squared: 0.1634
## F-statistic: 7.943 on 13 and 449 DF, p-value: 2.336e-14
The coefficients and significance changed a bit. Since the values changed, the drop variable was slightly collinear with the other explanatory variables.
best_model <- lm(score ~ ethnicity + gender + language + age + cls_perc_eval
+ cls_credits + bty_avg + pic_color, data = evals)
summary(best_model)
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = score ~ ethnicity + gender + language + age + cls_perc_eval +
## cls_credits + bty_avg + pic_color, data = evals)
##
## Residuals:
## Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
## -1.85320 -0.32394 0.09984 0.37930 0.93610
##
## Coefficients:
## Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) 3.771922 0.232053 16.255 < 2e-16 ***
## ethnicitynot minority 0.167872 0.075275 2.230 0.02623 *
## gendermale 0.207112 0.050135 4.131 4.30e-05 ***
## languagenon-english -0.206178 0.103639 -1.989 0.04726 *
## age -0.006046 0.002612 -2.315 0.02108 *
## cls_perc_eval 0.004656 0.001435 3.244 0.00127 **
## cls_creditsone credit 0.505306 0.104119 4.853 1.67e-06 ***
## bty_avg 0.051069 0.016934 3.016 0.00271 **
## pic_colorcolor -0.190579 0.067351 -2.830 0.00487 **
## ---
## Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 0.4992 on 454 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared: 0.1722, Adjusted R-squared: 0.1576
## F-statistic: 11.8 on 8 and 454 DF, p-value: 2.58e-15
score-hat = b0-hat+ b1-hat(ethnicty)+ b2-hat(gender)+ b3-hat(language)+ b4-hat(age)+ b5-hat(cls_perc_eval)+ b6-hat(cls_credits)+ b7-hat(bty_avg)+ b8-hat(pic_color)
qqnorm(best_model$residuals)
qqline(best_model$residuals)
plot(best_model$residuals)
abline(h = 0, lty = 3)
Assuming independence, the conditions for normality and ‘noise’ are met since in the qq-plot the data points fall along the normal line (with the exception of the ends, which is permitted more extra points than points near the center of the line and the spread of the residuals along the zero line does not fall into a pattern.
The original paper describes how these data were gathered by taking a sample of professors from the University of Texas at Austin and including all courses that they have taught. Considering that each row represents a course, could this new information have an impact on any of the conditions of linear regression? No. Even if the course is being taught by the same professor, class courses are independent of each other so evaluation scores from one course is independent of the other.
Based on your final model, describe the characteristics of a professor and course at University of Texas at Austin that would be associated with a high evaluation score. Based on the coefficients Professor would be younger male teaching one credit class, he would not belong to a minority group, he would have received this degree from a university where English is the main language. The professor would have a black and white picture and who have been rated beautiful.
Would you be comfortable generalizing your conclusions to apply to professors generally (at any university)? Why or why not?
No, this was not conducted as an experiment but based on a sample in a given university. As cultural value changes, these results may be different in other university or in a different time frame. ## References