uations 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 different amounts of information--from less than 'average' to more than 'a lot' on the rating scale--simply due to differences in the professor's style, is staggering" (Ceci 16-17).
Even if you have nothing to say, you can get higher scores by saying it charismatically! Be shrewd and let the Dr. Fox effect work for you!
GIVE LOTS OF HIGH GRADES!
Although researchers still debate whether or not instructors can out-and-out buy high ratings with high grades (Abrami, Howard say no), ample evidence does suggest that this would indeed be a prudent strategy to follow if you want to jack up those evaluation scores (and what nitwit doesn't?). Chacko believes that "the most prominent bias in student ratings of teaching effectiveness is the evaluation a student receives from the instructors in the form of a grade" (19). Vasta also believes that "the effect of grades on student evaluations of instruction must be interpreted as potentially quite powerful" (210). Max Hocutt writes:
A study of several thousand courses at my home university has recently confirmed what most professors have always suspected: students definitely give a higher rating to teachers who grade higher. The coefficient of correlation is a low but significant .38. This correlation might have been higher had the study considered not actual but expected grade. (Hocutt 60)Snyder and Clair concluded from their carefully controlled investigation that "a teacher can get a 'good' rating simply by assigning 'good' grades" (81). Their research confirmed earlier studies that showed that higher grades can contaminate evaluation ratings (the "reward effects"). And, thanks to that old halo effect, even evaluation items such as humor, self-reliance, and attitude toward students were affected. "This implies that student perceptions of most behavior dimensions of instructors are responsive to the instructor's evaluation of student performance" (23).
Similarly, Powell found that students rate instructors on the basis of a global impression which they form ("liking"), and th