Study on Characteristics of Efficient Professors – From the Perspectives of IS-VNU Students

Among the factors that have significant impact on student’ satisfaction, the quality of teaching staffs, particularly lecturers or professors 39 , has been explored in many studies as on[r]

Study on Characteristics of Efficient Professors – From the Perspectives of IS-VNU Students

Group sciences: Bế Ngọc Phương Mai Hồ Thanh Phương Phạm Ngọc Lê Huy Hà Anh

I. Introduction

The significant increase in both number and sizes of higher educational institutions in Vietnam in recent years has clearly made the higher education industry more competitive This forces universities and colleges to pay more attention on meeting the requirements and satisfaction of students – their major customers Students’ satisfaction is important to higher educational institutions as it not only reflects the educational services but is also closely related to the growth of the institutions Satisfied students may attract new students by getting involved in positive word-of-mouth communication with their friends and family members In addition, satisfied students may also come back and enroll in other courses provided by the institutions [CITATION Guo99 \m Sch04 \l 1033 ] The necessity of understanding students’ satisfaction and its determinants is even more substantial to Vietnam high educational institutions as in a recent study on 105 students of a Vietnam university, Pham[CITATION Lie17 \n \t \l 1033 ] found that only about 26% of students in the sample feel satisfied while 35% of them feel dissatisfied with their enrollment at the university Moreover, 40% of students in the sample refused to recommend the university to their family members and friends Surprisingly, while some Vietnam universities conduct annual surveys to collect feedback from students on their educational services, not many academic studies focus intensively on factors influencing students’ satisfaction (Pham, 2017)

Among the factors that have significant impact on student’ satisfaction, the quality of teaching staffs, particularly lecturers or professors39, has been explored in many studies as one of the most important determinants[CITATION Hil03 \m Poz00 \l 1033 ].In the higher education industry, if universities are regarded as service providers and knowledge and skills are standard services that they offer, professors can beperceivedas the middle men who deliver lectures, involving knowledge and skills, to the customers that are students Therefore, the quality, behaviors and attitudes of professors and their lectures should play a key role in determining the level of students’ satisfaction As suggested by Gruber, Reppel & Voss [CITATION Gru10 \n \t \l 1033 ], the more effective the professor is, the more satisfied students will be

However, the perception of an “effective professor” may vary among professors and students What professors consider to be “effective” and good for students may not really be effective from the students’ opinions Therefore, insights on what students expect an “effective professor” will offer many practical implications to higher educational institutions These understanding and knowledge may not only help lecturers to improve their own teaching quality but also assist the university in building a set of criteria for teaching staffs and facilitate the recruitment procedure Taking into account all of the above arguments, we devote this research to explore the question: “What are the characteristics of effective professors, from the perspective of students?” To answer this question, we apply Kano model, a methodology developed by professor Noriaki Kano in the 1980s This method allows us to investigate which components of products and services influence customer satisfaction, and more importantly, their different influential roles in determining customer satisfaction (Kano et al 1984, Sauerwein, et al 1996) Prior literature suggests that customer satisfaction was mainly considered as one-dimensional construction, i.e., the higher the perceived product quality, the higher the customer’s satisfaction However, in many cases, fulfilling an individual product or service requirement maynot lead to equal increase in customer satisfaction Kano solved this problem by introducing a new method, which categorized determinants of customer satisfaction into three different categories First,must-be requirements are considered to be prerequisites by the customers. Fulfilling these requirements are necessary and obvious, hence, will not increase customer satisfaction However, if these requirements are not fulfilled, the customers will be extremely dissatisfied Second, one-dimensional requirements are explicitly demanded by the customers Higher level of fulfillment of these requirements will result in higher customer satisfactionand vice versa Third, attractive requirements are not explicitly demanded by the customers but will have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction As customers not ask for them, if these requirements are missing, customers will not be dissatisfied However, fulfilling these requirements will lead to significant satisfaction from customer

professors into three different categories, we will know which characteristics are the prerequisites that professors should have as a must (i.e.,must-be requirements) In addition, characteristics that fall into the category of attractive requirements should gain particular attention from both professors and universities as they can significantly increase students’ satisfaction Moreover, since SERVQUAL has been the popular model applied in studies in Vietnam on determinants of customers’ satisfaction, we hope that our research will encourage more studies to investigate indicators of the teaching quality in high educational systemswith different methods to make the research stream more diverse and prosperous

We conduct this research in the context of International School – Vietnam National University (IS-VNU) A questionnaire, designed following Kano method style, was sent out to 143 IS-VNU students in different study programs and school years Findings from the analysis indicate that: First, three factors that are most influential to students’ satisfaction are “expertise”, “sense of humor”, and “good presentation skills” Second, although “reliability” does not have a significant impact on students’ satisfaction, the lack of this characteristic can cause severe disappointment to students Last, “approachability” and “empathy” are the two requirements that have relatively high coefficients in both satisfaction and dissatisfaction We hope that this paper will deliver to the readers better understandings on students’ requirements on their “ideal lecturer” In addition, using findings from this study, IS-VNU can make meaningful adaptation to the current teaching programs, curriculum, teaching methods and so on to better satisfy students’ expectation

The remaining of the paper proceeds as follows Section provides theoretical background on higher education as a service and satisfaction in higher education In this section, we also describe the important role of professors in determining higher educational quality as well as findings on the characteristics of an effective professor from prior research Kano method is explained in details in section 3, followed by the set of proposed characteristics of effective professors in section Section and presents data collection, data analyses and empirical results Section discusses and concludes

1 Educational servicequality and Satisfaction in higher education

Higher education has long been considered as a complex service in many prior studies (e.g., Curran & Rosen[CITATION Curran \n \t \l 1033 ];Davis & Swanson[CITATION Davis \n \t \l 1033 ];Eagle & Brennan[CITATION Eag \n \t \l 1033 ]; Hennig-Thurau[CITATION Hen01 \n \t \l 1033 ]) As educational services are mainly intangible, the professor’s teaching efforts are “produced” by professor and “consumed” by students[CITATION Sha951 \l 1033 ] On the one hand, educational service has several characteristics that are similar to a normal service For instance, each student has his/her demands or requirements for contents of lectures or attributes of his/her professor, whichis the same asrequirements from the customers for the service provider However, on the other hand, there are some differences between educational service and other services First,students are rather “partners” than “customers” in this kind of service Unlike several other services such as eating in restaurant, traveling by bus or sleeping in a hotel, in educational service, students as customers must take a huge responsibility for their own education and cannot just consume what they receive from professor, university or any higher educational institutions as the service provider[CITATION Sve07 \l 1033 ].Moreover, students are also considered as “co-creators of the value” as the success of the educational service’s “products” depends on both professors and students, as service provider and customers[CITATION Coo07 \m Var04 \t \m Var06 \n \t \l 1033 ] Under the guidance of one professor, the students with different levels of knowledge-acquiring ability will have very different learning outcomes In short, no matter which rolethe students play in the educational service, i.e., as “partners” or “co-creators of value”, they have significant contribution in creating a valuable learning experience in general and good teaching quality in particular

Nevertheless, customers’ (i.e., students’) perceived quality of higher educational service has still been considered as among the most important ones to higher educational institutions Since service quality is considered to be the difference between customers’ expectation and actual performance[CITATION Zei90 \l 1033 ],the quality of higher educational service can be defined as “the difference between what a student expects to receive and his/her perceptions of actual delivery”[CITATION ONe04 \p 42 \l 1033 ]

The above definition implies a close connection between students’ satisfaction and educational quality The better universities can fulfil students’ expectation, the better the quality and higher students’ satisfaction will be[CITATION Bro98 \m Guo99 \l 1033 ].In order to so, the institutions should have thorough understandings on students’ expectation A large research stream has focused extensively on exploring this topic, i.e what is included in students’ expectation at educational service and which factors can have an impact on their satisfaction Making students satisfied is especially important to the growth of higher educational instutions due to several reasons First, satisfied students can attract new students by giving them positive feedbacks for the course that they have enrolled In addition, satisfied students may come back in the future andregister for other courses organized by the institutions[CITATION Guo99 \m Wie02 \m Mav04 \m Mar5a \t \m Mar5b \n \t \m Hel071 \m Sch04 \l 1033 ] In addition, Guolla [CITATION Guo99 \n \t \l 1033 ] pointed out that overall course satisfaction is positively related to raising funds for the university and higher student motivation Considering this importance, in the next section, we focus on exploring the influences of professors on students’ satisfaction

2 The role of professors in determining students’ satisfaction

many characteristics of effective professors Some of the most notable characteristics include communication skills, enthusiasm, empathy, rapport and caring to students’ needs [ CITATION Gru10 \l 1033 ] It is interesting to learn from prior literature that being knowledgeable and having expertise in the teaching field are only two in dozens of different characteristics that students expect a professor to have Moreover, excellent teaching appears to be influenced more by the professors’ personality than the knowledge they provide in class [ CITATION Moo07 \l 1033 ]

In addition, it is important to study from the students’ point of view As Joseph et al [CITATION Jos05 \n \t \l 1033 ]pointed out, traditional approaches to investigate students’ satisfaction mainly choose the criteria based on the standards of administrators or academics, understandings from the standpoint of students – the primary target customers are crucial

III. Kano method

1 What is Kano method

In the 1980s, professor Noriaki Kano invented a method, which was then named after him, to analyze the product development and customer satisfaction The purpose of the method is to distinguish three types of requirements that affect customer preferences as follows

(1) Must-be requirements are the requirements that have to be included in the features of a product The customers will be very disappointed if these requirements are not fulfilled However, the fulfillment of these requirements will not increase customer satisfaction as these requirements are considered to be prerequisites of products or services Must-be requirements are minimum level that producers, or service providers must reach to satisfy their customers In other words, these requirements are must-met requirements, the customers will have no interests on product if these requirements are missing

(2) One-dimensional requirements:Regarding one-dimensional requirements, the customer’s satisfaction degree is proportional to the fulfilment of these requirements, or vice versa, that is, the customer’s dissatisfaction degree is proportional to the ignorance of these requirements Put in other words, the higher fulfillment of these requirements gains, the higher customer’s satisfaction will be

For example, Gruber, Reppel and Voss[CITATION Gru10 \n \t \l 1033 ] reported that good communication skills is a one-dimensional factor that students want their professor to acquire It means that better the professor’s communication skills are, the more satisfied students will be

(3) Attractive requirements: This type of requirements has the strongest influence on customer satisfaction Fulfilling these requirements produces a larger satisfaction degree than fulfilling one-dimensional requirements does However, if these requirements are not met, customer will not be dissatisfied

A typical example for this type of requirements is from the study of Gruber[CITATION Inv \n \t \l 1033 ]: the students who were surveyed showed their excitement on “variety of teaching method” factor and marked it as an attractive requirement for their professor This result implies that the students would show a lot of interests on the lectures that were delivered by different methods However, if professors not change their teaching method through lessons, the students are fine with it

2 Advantages of Kano method

Advantages of adopting Kano method are at least twofold First, product requirements are categorized in certain groups that are must-be, one-dimensional and attractive requirements This classifying will produce a recommendation for producers, or service providers, about which requirements should be more focused on than the others More precisely, producers or service providers should invest more efforts on one-dimensional and attractive requirements rather than must-be requirements, which are already at a satisfactory level, since they have a larger effect on the customer’s level of satisfaction

technical or financial reasons, the feature that has a greater influence on customer satisfaction should be carried out first

3 Major steps to apply Kano method

In general, the application of Kano method to explore determinants of customer satisfaction includes three major steps as follows

(1) Step one: Identification of product requirements In this stage, researchers will need to conduct interview or similar methods with customers to figure out what are their requirements on the product or services Researchers suggests that most customers are not clear about their desires and buying motives, particularly when the products or services are new if they are only asked about their expectation at the products Therefore, Shiba, Graham and Walden [CITATION Shi93 \n \t \l 1033 ] offer a set of four questions that help to reveal the “hidden” desires and purchasing motives of customers, which are:

1 Which associations does the customer make when using the product x? Which problems/ defects/ complaints does the customer associate with the use of the product x?

3 Which criteria does the customer take into consideration when buying the product x?

4 Which new features or services would better meet the expectations of the customer? What would the customer change in the product x?

(2) Step two: Construction of the Kano questionnaire

After identifying customers’ requirements towards the products/ services in step one, researchers now move to step two of designing the questionnaire for target customers In this questionnaire, for each chosen requirement or variable, a pair of questions is formulated with five different ways of answers The first question is called functional question, which concerns the customer’s reaction if the product has the requirement. The second question is called dysfunctional question, which concerns the customer’s reaction if the product does not have the requirement.

Table 15:Functional and dysfunctional question in the Kano questionnaire. If a lecturer has a lot of practical experiences which are

related to knowledge from the textbook and he/she can share those experiences in the class, how you feel? (Functional form of question)

1 I like it that way It must be that way I am neutral

4 I can live that way I dislike that way If a lecturer does not have many practical experiences,

therefore, they mainly focus on teaching knowledge from the textbook, how you feel?

(Dysfunctional form of question)

1 I like it that way It must be that way I am neutral

4 I can live that way I dislike that way

The two questions in Figure are designed for the characteristic of “having many practical experiences” of professors Students who the survey will need to provide answers for both of the questions These answers will then be coded based on the evaluation table provided by Kano (1984) as in Table

Table 16: Kano evaluation table

Customer requirement Dysfunctional (negative) question

Like Must be Neutral Live with Dislike

Functional (positive) question

Like Q A A A O

Must-be R I I I M

Neutral R I I I M

Live with R I I I M

Dislike R R R R Q

In Table 2, customer requirement is…

A: Attractive O: One-dimensional

M: Must-be Q: Questionable

R: Reverse I: Indifferent

dysfunctional question We then combine these two answers together in the evaluation table and arrive at category A It means that practical expertise factor is an attractive student’s factor from their view point If the answer falls in category M or category O, it means that the focused requirement or feature is considered as a must-be or one-dimension requirement, respectively, to the interviewee Category I indicates that the interviewee is indifferent to this feature The existence of this issue is not necessary and the does not care much about this feature The category Q is questionable answer In general, we only get this code Q when the question does not make sense, the interviewee misunderstands the question or they choose the answer randomly

(Step 3) Evaluation and interpretation

After having combined the answers from the functional and dysfunctional questions in the evaluation table, the next step is to analyze and interpret the results Researchers can conduct several extra analyses in this step depending on their goals For example, in our study, we calculate customer satisfaction coefficient to figure out whether satisfaction can be increased when a professor has criteria (or characteristics) listed in our questionnaire More details on this calculation will be explained in the section on data analyses

IV. Proposed characteristics of efficient professors

As stated above, the first step to apply Kano method to identify customers’ requirements, or in our case, which characteristics that students expect an efficient professor should have In this section we propose a list of characteristics of efficient professors that we assume IS-VNU students will need from their professors This list was made based on both reviewing prior literature on characteristics of efficient professors and our own expectation towards professors at IS-VNU

the future Therefore, sharing practical experience may change student's thought, help them to visualize how they will apply knowledge from lecture in their future work (2) Approachability: The approachability of the professor can be demonstrated by whether the professor is willing to answer students' questions[CITATION Bro04 \l 1033 ] Lecturers sometimes not know the problems that students encounter as well as the receptive ability of all the students in the class, so if the lecturer is approachable, the students will have the opportunity to ask freely and openly about their difficulties and understand more about the lectures Thus, the approachability of the lecture can inspire student to study

(3) Empathy (responsiveness):Responsiveness is considered as the readiness to assist customers and provide appropriate service[CITATION Zei \l 1033 ] In education perspective, this term implies the ability to handle students’ demand and their feedback efficiently It helps lecturers find out needs and wants of the students, suitable class hours or individual attention Responsiveness is also used to judge the attitude and punctuality of faculties in order to support student to obey the regulation of institution (4) Sense of humor: According to Lantos’s findings[CITATION Lan97 \n \t \l 1033 ], humorous teacher is a determinant of students’ satisfaction Humor is defined as a characteristic of having ability to tell amusing stories or making fun of discussed issues Students in the class of a funny lecturer are more likely to get the point of the lesson than their counterparts under the guidance of a lecturer that not have such an attribute This perspective is estimated whether students are excited if their professor is humorous and the content of lesson includes funny factor or not

(5) Reliability: Reliability is proficiency to serve the promised service dependably and accurately In our case, this characteristic implies that the lecture provides a clear syllabus with fair grading system from the beginning of the course and is always fair and consistent in their behaviors and evaluation though the course.Pariseau and McDaniel[CITATION Par \n \t \l 1033 ] show that reliability has been one of the most affective impact that students pay attention most.Gruber, Reppel and Voss[CITATION Gru10 \n \t \l 1033 ] also suggest that reliability is the fundamental factor of students’ satisfaction

to understand and most attractive way[CITATION Bro04 \l 1033 ] Even though lecturers have professional qualifications, if professors cannot interpret in different ways and just repeat several times in a lesson, the students will get bored Moreover, various explanations make lectures more interesting, attract students’ attention and help them understand the lesson better

(7) Good presentation skill: According to James[CITATION Jam15 \n \t \l 1033 ], in classroom environment, effective presentation skills are important for improving communication and creating positive learning experiences, which helps students to understand clearly and memorably It also helps teacher communicate complex information in simple and interesting ways to keep students engaged Having good presentation skills also gives lecturers the ability to summarize what they want to impart as succinctly as possible, thus saving working time

V. Data collection and Data analyses 1 Data collection

With the set of seven characteristics of efficient professors, as proposed in the previous section, we started to design our questionnaire survey following the style of Kano method As we choose to test seven characteristics, the questionnaire survey has fourteen questions in total Details of the questionnaire are presented in the Appendix An example of a couple of questions is in Table below

Table 17: Examples of functional and dysfunctional question inour questionnaire. If a lecturer has a lot of practical experiences which are

related to knowledge from the textbook and he/she can share those experiences in the class, how you feel?

(Functional form of question)

1 I like it that way It must be that way I am neutral

4 I can live that way I dislike that way If a lecturer does not have many practical experiences,

therefore, they mainly focus on teaching knowledge from the textbook, how you feel?

(Dysfunctional form of question)

1 I like it that way It must be that way I am neutral

totally The advantage of applying survey is time saving, low cost and high efficiency However, it also brings some drawbacks that respondents may understand the question wrongly Nevertheless, this is not our concern because there is Vietnamese translation below each and every question in our survey

2 Data analysis

After receiving the surveys, we combine answers using the Kano evaluation table as in Table below

Table 18:Kano evaluation table: Customer

requirement

Dysfunctional (negative) question

Like Must be Neutral Live with Dislike

Functiona l

(positive) question

Like Q A A A O

Must-be R I I I M

Neutral R I I I M

Live with R I I I M

Dislike R R R R Q

Customer requirement is:

A: Attractive O: One- dimensional B: Must-be Q: Questionable R: Reverse I: Indifferent

In this search, all data are coded, stored and analysed using Excel The frequency of each answer was calculated and reported in Table in the result section In addition, we also calculate the customer satisfaction coefficient This coefficient reveals whether satisfaction can be increased by fulfilling a requirement, in our case, when the professors have a chosen characteristic To get these coefficients, we need to apply the two following formulas, created by Kano (1984):

Extent of satisfaction: A+O

A+O+ M+I

Extent of dissatisfaction: O+ M

In the satisfaction formula, we add the attractive and one-dimensional columns and divide them by the total number of attractive, one-dimensional, must-be and indifferent factors The extent of dissatisfaction is calculated by adding the one-dimensional with must-be columns and divide by them four factors totally times minus one (-1) The character minus one emphasizes the negative influence on students’ satisfaction if this characteristic is not fulfilled

The positive CS-coefficient (satisfaction) ranges from to 1: if the value of the characteristic is closer to 1, it has higher impact on customers/ students’ satisfaction and the further the value is to 0, the less influence on them In contrast, the negative CS-coefficient ranges from to -1 The student’ dissatisfaction increases if the value approaches to -1, implying analyzed characteristic is not fulfilled The feature does not cause the dissatisfaction if it is not met when the value gets closer to

VI. Results and Discussion

A summary of our findings is presented in Table The satisfaction and disatisfaction coefficients are plotted in Figure

Table 19: Result table

Experti se Approachab ility Empat hy Sense of Humor Reliabili ty Variet y of teachi ng metho d Good present ati-on skill

A 62 48 50 78 13 64 43

O 64 69 63 42 68 28 75

M 12 28 19 58 10 19

I 23 18 31 32 21 57 20

R 0 2

Q 0 2

Dissatisfact ion coefficient

-47.2% -59.5% -50.3% -30.8% -78.8%

n coefficient

Figure 71:Effect of Professor’s attributes on level of Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction of Students

Results from Table reveal which attribute professorsshould have to satisfyIS-VNU student’s needs and which attribute can attract students' interest and excitement From Table 5, it can be seen that in chosen seven investigated characteristics, there are five one dimensional factors and two attractive factors

transmission of knowledge from lecturers to students is also very important Good presentation skills of professors help to improve communication and create positive learning experiences that allow students to understand the lesson clearly[CITATION Jam15 \t \l 1033 ] Moreover, lecturers should be approachable, friendly, listen to students’ needs regarding the lesson or other university problem and help students solve them.Those attributes give students the opportunity to receive the lecture in the most efficient and effective way

Although “reliability” does not increase students’ satisfaction a lot compared to other variable (satisfaction coefficient = 50.6%), failing to fulfil this requirement will result in highly dissatisfaction from students The dissatisfaction coefficient of this requirement is 78.8%, the highest in all coefficients It can be seen that “reliability and fairness” are fundamental attributes to create student satisfaction, which is similar to previous research result by Gruber, Reppel and Voss[CITATION Gru10 \n \t \l 1033 ] Most students always expect the teacher to have clear syllabus, explain clearly grading system from the beginning of the course, and give marks fairly and reasonably throughout the course

The two remaining attributes, “sense of humor” and “variety of teaching methods” are in the category of “attractive” This means students not explicitly ask for these two factors However, if the professors can provide them, students will be extremely excited.Humor is not a necessary attribute for a lecturer, but it has a great influence on student satisfaction If a professor is funny, their lectures will be interesting and help students concentrate more Moreover, they can even make boring lecture content interesting by applying it to a funny situation[ CITATION Gru10 \l 1033 ].This finding is consistent with Lantos[CITATION Lan97 \n \t \l 1033 ], whosuggests that lecturers should use humor as a tool to motivate students Similarly, 64 out of 143 students (roughly 45% of the sample) are interested in experiencing a different way of studying such as learning from case studies, simulation games / role plays and so on

and “empathy” are the two requirements that have relatively high coefficients in both satisfaction and dissatisfaction

VII. Conclusion and Recommendation

This research aims at exploring what determines an “efficient professors” from students’ perspectives, or in other words, what characteristics professors or lecturers should have to satisfy students We proposed seven different characteristics of an efficient professor and tested how each of these characteristics may influence students’ satisfaction with Kano method (Kano, 1984) The empirical analysis was conducted with a sample of 143 students from IS-VNU Findings from this analysis suggests that professors who are knowledgeable and have a lot of practical experiences are highly valued by students Also, students prefer professors with good sense of humor and good communication skills, so that the lectures can be more interesting and attractive Although the remaining characteristics, i.e., approachability, empathy, variety of teaching methods play an important role in increasing students’ satisfaction, “reliability” is the most notable as failing to have this factor will lead to high disappointment from students

Practical implications: Using findings from this study, IS-VNU lectures can make meaningful adaptation to the current teaching programs, curriculum, teaching methods and so on to better satisfy students’ expectation.According to the recommendation from Kano method that are listed above, IS-VNU’s board of directors should focus more on the professor’s attributes that have larger influence on students’ satisfaction in the case that two or more features cannot be accomplished in the same time In that case, they should aim at the professors who are expert in the field they work in because expertise has the strongest impact on the students’ level of satisfaction In addition, the professors who deliver the lectures to students should be reliable and fair due to the largest influence of this attribute on students’ dissatisfaction

of standard efficient professors and lead to a more complete knowledge of improving teaching quality

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