her SEF scores; if faculty know the variables affecting their careers, they will meet these criteria" (13).
Everyone knows that SNEF ratings are contaminated by all kinds of influences irrelevant or hostile to effective teaching (see Renner 129 for a partial list). But if you cannily manipulate these factors, you can boost your evaluation ratings without raising your workload. Should you feel ashamed about this, keep in mind that higher scores will make you happy, your chairperson happy, your Dean happy, your Provost happy, your President happy, and the taxpayers happy. It's a win-win-win situation. Follow my advice and have a Great Evaluation Experience (or GEE!).
CAREFULLY MANIPULATE THE IMPRESSION YOU MAKE ON THE FIRST DAY OF CLASS!
"First impressions," Haleta reminds us, "are crucial for students, the teacher, and the teacher-student relationship," influencing the classroom climate for the entire semester or term (16).
In this regard, nonverbal communication may be more important than what you actually have to say. Students, you see, often arrive at summative judgments about us very quickly--well before we have a chance to tell them about our grading policy or course organization, and before we can display our knowledge or fairness. Ambady and Rosenthal, for example, "have shown that students arrive at opinions about teachers within seconds of being exposed to these teachers. The students' impressions are highly correlated with end-of-semester ratings generated by other students who had these same teachers for an entire course" (Ceci 5). According to Drew Weston, who summarizes these studies in Psychology: Mind, Brain & Culture (1996), "the correlations between initial nonverbal ratings [the videotapes of instructors that students had seen were silent] and eventual student evaluations are as near perfect as one finds in psychology" (288).
Here are some tips about how you should act and look as you enter the classroom for the first time to make a lasting impression that will improve those end-of-the-semester ratings.
Widmeyer and Low (1988), in their "Dr. Jim Wilson" experiment, gave students a biographical sketch of an alleged special lecturer named "Dr. Jim Wilson" that emphasized that Wilson was a warm person while another group was given a sketch that described him as "cold." Students who were told that Wilson was cold assessed him as "less pleasant, less sociable, less good-natured and less humorous than students in the warm condition. Students in the cold condition were also less likely than their counterparts to surmise that Dr. Wilson would 'go far' in his teaching career" (Damron "Instructor" 23). Widmeyer and Loy concluded that "by being perceived as a warm individual, a teacher can influence students' ratings not only of his or her personality, but also of his or her teaching abilities.... [I]f instructors want to 'get ahead,' they should present themselves as 'warm'" (Damron 23). Once again, the benefits of the halo effect can be yours, if you know how to manipulate students.
BE PERSONABLE AND CHARISMATIC!
When teenagers were asked to describe their WORST teachers, eighty percent said "dull or boring" (poor knowledge of the subject provoked least concern--twenty-one percent). To improve your evaluation scores, you are going to have to accept the fact that college 'teaching' has less to do with knowledge and information and more with convincing students you are one hell of a lecturer, even when spouting nonsense. It's not what you communicate, but how.
Engulfed by a twenty-four-hours-of-amusement culture from their first days of watching "Sesame Street," students want to be entertained, which is why "fun" turns up so often on student evaluations of instructors. What students want are instructors who are "expressive" and "charismatic," regardless of whether they have anything to say (the "Dr. Fox effect"). Back in 1973, Naftulin and his associates found that an entertaining, charismatic lecturer (actually an actor introduced as "Dr. Myron L. Fox") who spoke deliberate nonsense received surprisingly high eval