Do politics really tilt classrooms?

Students feel they learn more from professors whose views jibe with their own, researchers find.

from the March 21, 2008 edition

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"This is probably empirically one of the best studies I've seen on this topic," says John Ishiyama, editor in chief of the Journal of Political Science Education, which will be publishing the Woessners' most recent peer-reviewed article in September.

Students who saw their professor as having a similar political disposition to their own reported that they learned more. But several explanations for that are possible. It could be that students who disagree with their professor's views follow a natural tendency to avoid or discredit information in the class. "But it's also possible," Kelly-Woessner says, "that rather than affecting real learning, you're merely affecting students' confidence in their learning." Those who are frequently challenged may learn a lot but lose confidence in the process.

That's important, she says, because "people who are confident that they understand politics are much more likely to participate." Professors commonly play "devil's advocate" to push students to back up their arguments, and debates make for lively classes, but this suggests the need to take care that some students don't shut down in response.

No correlation was found between students' partisan difference with professors and their sense of being graded fairly. "That was very striking ... [because] one of the arguments about liberal faculty has been that somehow they're punishing conservative students," Mr. Ishiyama says.

Professors, on the other hand, may have cause for concern if their prospects for tenure are tied strongly to student evaluations. The greater the ideological or partisan differences that students perceive with their professor, the lower their evaluation of him or her. Students aren't always objective, so "if students say, 'I feel like the professor was biased,' you can't really take that at face value," says Ms. Colby of the Carnegie Foundation.

The Woessners' next study will measure how students' ideological views change over time and how that relates to professors' actual ideological and partisan affiliations.

Meanwhile, they draw on their practice debating each other respectfully as they strive to be good role models for students. The two met in graduate school in 1996 and married four years later. "When Matthew and I disagreed, instead of taking offense, we took interest," Kelly-Woessner says.

They've both moderated their views over time. "April has an instinct to challenge my first assumptions," Woessner says. She'll point out bias on Fox News that goes right past him, and he'll do the same when they're watching MSNBC.

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