Professors hoping for positive student evaluations at the end of the semester should look no further than leftovers from Halloween or the candy aisle of their local supermarket.
A recent study to be published in an upcoming issue of Teaching of Psychology Journal, found that students who eat chocolate before filling out a course evaluation may give their professor a higher rating than they otherwise would.
The study, entitled "Fudging the Numbers: Distributing Chocolate Influences Student Evaluations of an Undergraduate Course," [el título se merece también una chocolatina, o un terroncillo de azúcar] was conducted by Cal State-Northridge psychology professor Robert Youmans and Benjamin Jee, a researcher at Northwestern. Their subjects were students in a lecture class that was also separated into two lab sections taught by the same teaching assistant.
To conduct the experiment, Youmans pretended to be administering course evaluations on behalf of the student government. For one section, he passed around a bag of mini Hershey bars [¿cómo pueden venderse tan baratos? ¿y qué no harían estas almas cándidas y glotonas por una buena caja de pralines belgas?] and told students that they were leftover from a previous event [ladinos, ladinos]. The other section, where students were given the course evaluation without any chocolate, served as the control group.
For each of the nine questions on the evaluation form, students who were offered chocolate rated their professor more favorably than students who were not offered chocolate.
"I was actually a little surprised," Jee said. "I was skeptical that we would get this result."
Well, I [I mean yo, the guy posting] am surprised that he was surprised.
1 comentario:
Pues me ire al super a comprar chocolates!
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