[HN Gopher] Availability of cookies affects evaluation of teaching
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Availability of cookies affects evaluation of teaching
Author : polm23
Score : 37 points
Date : 2020-10-25 11:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
| jimhefferon wrote:
| The best study that I know of on student evaluation of teaching
| was done at the Air Force Academy, where they assign students to
| teachers at random. Bottom line is that student performance in
| later classes is negatively correlated with student evaluation of
| teaching.
| http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.p...
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| Wait, you have an above average teacher and do well, then have
| an average one and do average (worse).
| analog31 wrote:
| There might be a confounding factor here. For a variety of
| reasons, I know a lot of academics. It's pretty widespread for
| teachers to prefer an early schedule for a variety of reasons.
| One is simply to help them organize their time better. Another
| is a rumor that earlier classes get better students. In any
| event it many mean that the teachers with better seniority get
| first crack at the better schedules.
|
| I've known teachers who bring cookies on evaluation day.
| Another rule of thumb is that evaluations tend to favor
| teachers who give out easy grades.
|
| The evaluations that my spouse received contained threats of
| violence.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| There are thousands of potential confounding factors. But
| this study seems to me to address many of the obvious ones,
| and provides reasonable data suggesting that, while there may
| be good ways to assess teaching, student evaluations are not
| one of them.
|
| > I've known ...
|
| That is common. I had a friend who left a picture of their
| family on the desk.
|
| I am sorry to hear about your spouse's evals. That stinks.
| karatinversion wrote:
| > Bottom line is that student performance in later classes is
| negatively correlated with student evaluation of teaching.
|
| I at least read "later" here as "subsequent, following"
| classes, not classes which take place later in the day.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think you misunderstood what was meant by "later" :)
| tekstar wrote:
| The margin of error in the results is greater than the difference
| between the groups.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Are the +/- values the distribution of the data rather than the
| margin of error. So on average the cookie group was still
| better.
|
| Also I wonder if someone could draw the same conclusion that
| the environment being taught in (i.e. has cookies) is an
| important factor along with the actual material being taught.
| pacbard wrote:
| I don't know what you mean by margin of error. The results in
| the paper are a little confusing because they report mean and
| standard deviation while t-tests use mean and standard error.
|
| In Table 3, they report the 95% confidence interval for the
| treatment condition (i.e., receiving cookies) as 0.67-11.62, so
| it seems that the difference between the two conditions is
| significant at the 5% level. Interestingly, the reported
| p-value here is "just" 0.02 instead of the <0.001 that they
| include in the abstract.
| laGrenouille wrote:
| Yes, I was confused about that as well. I think that the
| results are given as (mean +/- sd) rather than (mean +/- SE),
| though I do not understand why. Is that common in any field? I
| have not seen it in the computational social sciences or
| medicine fields, at least not right next to a p-value.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| Conclusion: "The provision of chocolate cookies had a significant
| effect on course evaluation. These findings question the validity
| of SETs and their use in making widespread decisions within a
| faculty."
|
| I disagree with this conclusion and note that the cookies were
| provided during the course, not during the evaluation.
|
| It seems obvious to me (and should be to anyone who has been in a
| class) that a course with cookies is a better experience that may
| indeed result in more knowledge transfer. So this would validate
| the SET.
| azhenley wrote:
| As a professor, I sometimes feel as though teaching is more about
| customer service than education. It is unfortunate.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| There is a reason we don't just give people books and tell them
| to learn it themselves. Engaging, likable teachers help people
| learn. Swaying their sentiment with parlor tricks apparently
| helps gain favor, but the real question is, does this translate
| to them learning more?
| threatofrain wrote:
| The presence of cookies is known to affect the perception of time
| in a way that interacts with your BMI.
| snicker7 wrote:
| "Third-year medical students"
| ggm wrote:
| Subjectively, the presence of food or drink implies a concern for
| your physiological wellbeing. Since it was not a defined
| contractual element of the exchange, it also represents a bonus,
| an above-and-beyond.
|
| It would be interesting to have tested this during the time of
| fidget spinners or some other tchotchke, to remove the food
| element but that aside, I think a weakly confirming result would
| be confirming what we expect: signs of care and emotional
| engagement beyond the immediately neccessary improve mood, and so
| improve _some_ outcomes.
|
| There is a saying that positive reinforcement beats negative
| reinforcement but it comes with an implicit corollary: negative
| reinforcement beats nothing: That negative pupil teacher
| interaction reports exist with higher scores should not be
| surprising, because it is possible SOME people achieved higher
| scores, despite hating (and negatively rating) their teacher.
| vmception wrote:
| A similar study showed more favorable trial court results for the
| defendant in the hour after the judge's lunch time
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