While colleges are busy judging students’ Facebook habits, students may be doing the same to faculty.
College students judge professors based on their Facebook profiles, according to a new study published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking. The research shines new light on how faculty and students use the social network to communicate with each other.
In the study, “Professors’ Facebook Content Affects Students’ Perceptions and Expectations,” researchers worked with 110 undergraduates – 77 female and 33 male – to gauge their responses to a 39-year-old male professor’s Facebook page.
Unbeknownst to the students, the professor and his Facebook pages, were fictional.
Each student randomly viewed one of six different (fake) profiles, designed to represent the professor as being either:
- Politically conservative
- Politically liberal
- Religious
- Family-oriented
- Socially-oriented, or
- Professional.
Students were then asked to rate the professor’s skill, friendliness, popularity and appropriateness based on what they saw in the profile. They were also asked to rate their own likelihood of taking the professor’s class, how difficult they thought the class would be and how much they respected him.
Here’s how the students responded:
Professors with professionally-oriented profiles were viewed as the most skilled, while socially-oriented and politically conservative professors were seen as least skilled.
Social professors were judged to be least likely to be difficult, while conservative professors were assumed to give tough courses.
On both ends of the political spectrum, students had little positive to say: they were seen as least friendly and least respectable, based on how they wore their politics on their sleeve.
There was also little respect for the social professor, while the family-oriented version was seen as very respectable.
But students were most interested in the professional information on the professor’s profile – though said that information was least influential when forming an opinion about the instructor.
The takeaway: Students form perceptions of faculty based on what they disclose. So make sure instructors remember they need to be just as careful on Facebook as they remind their students to be.
How does your faculty interact with social networking? Tell us in the comments section, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.
The post Professors: Watch what you say on Facebook! appeared first on Higher Ed Morning.