Voice in Digital Education: The Impact of Instructor's Perceived Gender & Age on Student Learning & Evaluation

Studies demonstrate that students' implicit gender and age bias strongly influences how they evaluate instructors based on in‐class interactions. Instructors perceived to deviate from conventional gender and age roles can receive lower evaluation ratings and more negative feedback. Instructor positions require leadership and authority, traditionally male‐oriented behavior traits. Consequently, when female instructors exhibit such traits, their evaluations are often negatively impacted. Students' implicit bias also extends into digital environments. In a recent study, dental students were reported to evaluate digital resources and instructors differently based on perceived vocal characteristics, in spite of positive learning outcomes. As digital resources have become integral to many educational environments, and commonly feature only audio cues from instructors, it is imperative to investigate the impact of implicit bias in evaluations of digital resources and instructors. This study aimed to assess the impact of this phenomenon in undergraduate and graduate science education. Undergraduate and graduate students in human anatomy courses were randomly assigned to view one of five online tutorials. Four of the five tutorials featured identical spinal cord anatomy content, but were narrated by individuals of different gender and age. One tutorial was a control video, featuring visual origami instructions without audio. Learning outcomes were measured by prequiz vs. postquiz comparison across the five groups. Participants completed an evaluation of the tutorial and instructor and the results were analyzed and compared across the five groups. Results demonstrated a statistically significant increase in postquiz performance in the four experimental groups compared to the control. The increased learning outcome was not significantly different across the four experimental groups, suggesting that learning occurred regardless of the gender and age of the narrator. Qualitative survey of the resource revealed no significant difference in overall rating across the four experimental tutorials. Nonetheless, the experimental tutorials were consistently rated higher than the control tutorial. Narrators of the experimental tutorials were evaluated significantly higher than the instructor of the control video. For instructor survey items such as approachability, acceptance, inclusiveness and caring of student learning, younger male and younger female narrators received higher ratings than the older narrators. As the role of digital resources becomes increasingly important, the results of this study may have important implications in the future landscape of education and the educator work force model.