Creative Education, 2016, 7, 1154-1165 Published Online June 2016 in SciRes. http://www.scirp.org/journal/ce http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ce.2016.78120 How to cite this paper: Serra, M. J., & Magreehan, D. A. (2016). Instructor Fluency Correlates with Students’ Ratings of Their Learning and Their Instructor in an Actual Course. Creative Education, 7, 1154-1165. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ce.2016.78120 Instructor Fluency Correlates with Students’ Ratings of Their Learning and Their Instructor in an Actual Course Michael J. Serra, Debbie A. Magreehan Department of Psychological Sciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA Received 28 May 2016; accepted 31 May 2016; published 3 June 2016 Copyright © 2016 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Abstract The experience of ease or fluency that occurs when learners acquire information is often highly related to their metacognitive judgments of learning for that information. Laboratory-based re- search indicates that fluency can contribute to students’ overconfident judgments of learning and predictions of future test performance. Such research, however, typically involves artificial learn- ing situations presented for brief periods of time and without a strong investment on the part of the learners. In actual courses, the most likely source of fluency may be instructor fluency: the ex- perience of fluency that stems from content-independent attributes of the instructor and his or her presentation of the information. To examine whether this form of fluency relates to students’ judgments of learning in actual academic courses, we include a measure of instructor fluency in a survey completed by college students (n = 606) answering questions about their course instruc- tors. Students’ content-independent perceptions of instructor fluency (e.g., volume; eye contact) are related to their judgments of learning for the course content, to their ratings of various quali- ties of the instructor and the course, and to their self-reported interest and motivation in the course. Importantly, these relationships maintain when we control for students’ final grades in the course and despite the fact that students make these ratings at a long temporal delay from the classroom experience. Therefore, much as occurs in the laboratory, students’ metacognitive judgments of their learning and ratings of instructor attributes are related to content independent qualities of their course instructors in actual semester-long courses. Keywords Fluency, Judgments of Learning, Judgment Bias, Student Ratings, Teaching Evaluations