Therese L. Lueck

The Interaction Effects of Gender on Teaching Evaluations.

Student evaluations remain a widely used method of assessing courses and the quality of teaching in higher education for personnel and merit decisions. Yet much controversy surrounds the student evaluation as a measurement of teaching effectiveness. One aspect of this controversy deals with the effect gender has on these evaluations. Does the gender of the instructor affect results on student evaluation instruments? Are female instructors at a disadvantage in the student evaluation process? Does the gender of the student have an effect on the evaluation process? This study was designed to explore answers to these and a number of other questions. It focuses on the field of mass communication, a previously unexamined field with regard to this type of investigation.

“Her Say” in the Media Mainstream: A Cultural Feminist Manifesto

The “Her Say” column of the “Womanews” section in the Chicago Tribune functioned as an editorial to position the new womens section and provide women-centered perspectives on issues. Written by women from outside the Tribune staff during its 1991 launch, “Her Say” spoke in voices drawn from the larger womens community, often harkening back to earlier notions of gender to bring forward concepts and rework them to fit American women in the 1990s. Using sex difference and privileging sisterhood, “Her Say” articulated the terms of a separate womens culture, the bounds of which continued to be defined by newspapers across the nation as they introduced their own womens sections. Through “Her Say” this section signaled a shift in the media paradigm from liberal feminism to a cultural feminist approach, which called for a reconnection among women through womens media in the media mainstream. The myth for the 1990s that emerged from “Her Say” was that of a world-weary prodigal daughter returning to the hearth. As the mouthpiece for the “Womanews” section, “Her Say” heralded a revaluing of “woman,” and challenged the industry to hasten its redefinition of “news” for 21st -century relevancy.

China's Soft Power: A New York Times Introduction of the Confucius Institute

The Chinese government and its U.S. partners have established more than 70 Confucius Institutes in the United States since 2004. This study focuses on how the New York Times coverage of Confucius Institutes functioned as a narrative of introduction of the institute in the U.S. press. The culturological construction of news that this analysis reveals is one of reportage generated in a culturally charged context of politically constructed discourse. Neither communicating the symbolic significance of an emerging China narrative nor analyzing its Western and global implications was evidenced as the New York Times relied on a 20th-century journalistic paradigm and its anti-communist discourse. The news leader told an American audience of the coming of the Confucius Institute through a continuance of a narrative situated in the existing “China Frame,” enabled by the papers reliance on tradition, mythology, and the journalistic practices of a bygone news culture.

The effect of gender on course evaluations in mass communications: a pilot study

This pilot study utilized a male and a female instructor from a midwestern US university, using a production course and traditional lecture course from each. The instructor was not present during the administration. The study found a correlation between gender of instructor and gender of student in the mass communication courses studied. Although none of the studys hypotheses was supported, significant findings and the high correlation found suggest a relationship between instructors and students of the same gender.