A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a series of posts on student evaluations of teaching (see here for the latest one, and the links at the bottom of this post for more). The overall conclusions from the literature on student evaluations of teaching is that they are biased (against women and minorities), they don't measure teacher quality very well (if at all), and many teachers (especially male teachers) don't respond to the feedback from the evaluations by improving their teaching.
As if things could get any worse for student evaluations of teaching, I just read this 2007 article by Robert Youmans and Benjamin Jee (both University of Illinois at Chicago), published in the journal Teaching in Psychology (ungated version here). Youmans and Jee investigate the impact of giving students chocolate on the student evaluations of three courses (two statistics courses, and one research methods course, all at the University of Illinois at Chicago). Their experiment was straightforward:
During the ninth week of instruction, all participants completed an informal midsemester evaluation about the lecture section of their course (the discussion sections were not evaluated at this time)... All students received the same nine-question form... For each question, the student provided a rating from 1 (very poor) to 5 (excellent)...
The experimental manipulation involved the treatment of students prior to their completion of the evaluation forms. In half of the sections, students had the opportunity to take a small bar of chocolate from a bag passed around by the experimenter before the evaluations began. Importantly, the experimenter told participants in these sections that he had chocolate left from another function that he “just wanted to get rid of” and that the students were welcome to take a piece. The fact that the chocolate was the property of the experimenter was emphasized so participants would not misattribute the chocolate as a gift from their instructor or teaching assistant.
Now, if students are providing an unbiased evaluation of the teacher in their course, then giving them chocolate should make no difference. However, Youmans and Jee find that:
Participants who were offered chocolate gave higher ratings on average (M = 4.07, SD = .88) than participants who were not offered chocolate (M = 3.85, SD = .89), F(1, 92) = 3.85, p = .05, d = 0.33.
The effect is relatively small, but statistically significant. Giving students chocolate increases student evaluations of teaching. Sweet!
Read more:
- Gender biases in student evaluations of teaching
- Are student evaluations of teaching even measuring teaching quality?
- Gender bias in principals' evaluations of primary teachers in Ghana
- More on gender bias in student evaluations of teaching
- Can a simple intervention reduce gender bias in student evaluations of teaching?
- Hardly the final words on student evaluations of teaching
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