atings.
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 evaluations from an audience of educators and mental health professionals. Naftulin concluded that a lecturer's authority, wit, and personality can "seduce" students into the illusion of having learned, even when the content of the lecture was nil. Although there is still much discussion about the educational seduction paradigm (see Abrami "Educational Seduction"), a number of other studies show that highly expressive instructors get higher ratings on evaluation forms even when the content of the talk was "low" and did not improve student achievement (see Abrami's review of studies, 447-50).
Recently, William Cenci has shown, through a successfully controlled classroom experiment in which the content of a course taught in two different semesters was identical in all salient respects, that an instructor, merely by speaking more "enthusiastically"--defined as varying voice pitch and using more hand gestures--can seduce students into rating every aspect of the instructor and course more highly than when the instructor spoke less dramatically, another powerful demonstration of the "halo effect." They thought that the grading system was fairer (from 3.03 to 3.72), that the professor knew more, that he was more tolerant of other points of view, that he was better organized, that he was more accessible outside of class (even though the instructor kept exactly the same schedule, but his score in this category went from 2.99 to 4.06), and that even the textbook had improved (2.06 to 2.98, form "poor" to "average")! Moreover, thanks solely to the more enthusiastic delivery used in the second semester, students in that course were seduced into thinking that they had actually learned more than students in the less animated course, when in fact they had not: "The end-of-semester point totals for the identical sets of exams (based on nearly identical lectures and identical texts) were virtually identical for the two semesters in both mean and standard deviation. The fact that the students stated that they had learned emphatically 