Turner College Alum Hayley Tillery Publishes Academic Study

Turner College alum Hayley Tillery, a doctoral student at Auburn University, recently joined colleagues from the University of South Florida and Auburn University in publishing an academic study in the Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Education.  Tillery’s study explores the ratings and reviews of instructors from top hospitality programs in the United States, using data from the online platform RateMyProfessor.com.  The study uses hospitality instructors’ ratings, rankings, and textual reviews in order to understand how students view their performance and the overall rank of the university.  The examination ultimately relied upon data from 24,511 student evaluations of 2,251 instructors across 151 universities.  To identify recurring positive and negative themes, Tillery and her co-authors conducted sentiment analysis of the textual reviews using the tool, Lexalytics, to extract the sentiment from the pieces of text.  Sentiment scores ranged from −1 (negative) to 1 (positive), with a score of 0 being “neutral.”  A total of 6,134 negative, 967 neutral, and 17,410 positive reviews were identified.  Among the most effective instructors, the top three tag names were “respected,” “caring,” and “gives good feedback.”  Among the least effective instructors, the top three tag names were “tough grader,” lecture-heavy,” and “get ready to read.”  The institutions with the highest average sentiment scores were the University of Nevada – Las Vegas, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Fisher College and Florida International University.  The lowest-scoring institutions were Indiana University of Pennsylvania, University of Mississippi, East Carolina University and the University of Central Florida.