| Dissertation Abstract--Idaho State University (2020)While there is higher education research on age, experience, gender, and faculty educational attainment in regards to various proxy measure of teaching effectiveness, there is little research that has explored these characteristics in an online setting that utilizes the curriculum development and delivery format that is used by the institution.This study explores the effect of certain instructor characteristics on proxy measures of teaching effectiveness. The instructor characteristics include age, gender, educational degree, and semesters taught. The proxy measures of teaching effectiveness include student evaluations, peer evaluations, average final student grade, and student drop rates. These relationships were evaluated using multiple regressions in five general education courses: Science, English, Math, History, and Humanities.The only instructor characteristic that resulted in a statistically significant effect and that made largeimpacts on the proxy measures of teaching effectiveness was gender. Female instructors received better results in regards to several of the proxy measures of teaching effectiveness than male instructors.Implications for the current professional developmentand evaluation modelsused by the institutional administrators are discussed along with suggestions for future research based on initial findings.Key Words: online, teaching effectiveness, adjunct faculty, gender |