Question

Teaching and research A college newspaper interviews a psychologist about student ratings of the teaching of faculty members. The psychologist says, “The evidence indicates that the correlation between the research productivity and teaching rating of faculty members is close to zero.” The paper reports this as “Professor McDaniel said that good researchers tend to be poor teachers, and vice versa.” Explain why the paper’s report is wrong. Write a statement in plain language (don’t use the word correlation) to explain the psychologist’s meaning.

Short answer

Teaching ratings and research productivity of the faculty members are unrelated to each other.

Step-by-step solution

Given information

Physiologist statement:

"The findings suggests that the relationship between research production and faculty members' teaching ratings is close to zero."

Paper report:

"According to Professor McDaniel, good researchers make lousy teachers, and vice versa."

Explanation

Due to the zero value, faculty members' teaching ratings and research production have no bearing on each other.

In other words,

Because of the zero value, faculty members' teaching ratings and research production are unrelated.

Thus,

Higher (or lower) teaching ratings are not always associated with higher (or lower) research productivity.

Similarly,

Faculty members that have a low research productivity are not necessarily those who have a higher (or lower) research productivity.