Northwestern professors may have a new way to garner a promotion: chocolate.
Giving students chocolate improves results on teacher evaluations, according to a new study conducted in part by a NU researcher.
The study, “Fudging the Numbers: Distributing Chocolate Influences Student Evaluations of an Undergraduate Course,” will be published later this month in the education journal Teaching of Psychology. It was conducted by NU researcher Benjamin Jee and Cal State Northridge University Prof. Robert Youmans. They became interested in the subject when studying together at the University of Illinois.
Jee and Youmans worked in large lecture classes that had one professor but two discussion sections, taught by the same TA. On the day of professor evaluations, they gave mini Hershey’s chocolate bars to one lab section and not to the other. The researchers believe the chocolate was the only thing that was different between the classes.
“(The sections) met on the same day, one right after another, covered the same material (and) saw the same lecture by the professor,” Jee said. “We wanted to try to equate for all the experiences up to the manipulation.”
Youmans passed out the chocolate, saying it was left over from a function. Not every student took the offer.
“Here we have something that has absolutely nothing to do with the course,” Youmans said. “It’s a stranger that gave them some candy right before their evaluations. And that stranger pushed their evaluations up a lot. That’s the rub.”
After looking at multi-question evaluations from about 100 students in three different courses, the researchers found an average difference of 0.25 points on a five-point scale overall, said Jee, who called it the “chocolate effect.”
The response to “Is the instructor friendly?” increased from a 3.9 to a 4.2 for the students offered the sweets, while chocolate-offered students gave the course overall a 4.0 compared to a 3.6, Youmans said.
“That’s probably the difference between a professor being told, ‘Hey you need to work on your teaching,’ and ‘Good work,'” Youmans said. “Students aren’t just evaluating for the hell of it, they’re doing it so the instructor has some accountability. One of the cornerstones of getting tenure or getting promotion is these evaluations.”
Teacher evaluations are used to determine which professors get tenure, Northwestern CTEC Director Nedra Hardy said.
“It depends on the department and the schools what criteria they use, but the CTEC reports are a part of the whole package of criteria they use,” she said.
Students also rely on CTECs to determine what courses to choose.
“Outside of asking my adviser what to take, (CTECs) are the most significant factor in what courses to take,” Weinberg junior Andrew Pellegrini said.
Students, however, said they are skeptical that their mood actually affects how they evaluate professors.
“I’ve been in good moods and given awful CTECs,” Communication senior Govind Kumar said. “For me, it’s about my personal connection with the professor.”
Weinberg junior Katie Fine admitted that her mood does affect how she rates her professors, but said “no way” would chocolate influence her evaluations.
The researchers hope the study will force universities to standardize their process of collecting teacher evaluations.
“We’re not advocating that instructors go out and buy chocolate so they can get that effect,” said Jee, who sometimes distributes chocolate to classes he teaches. “But that it should be standardized, and most likely, perhaps sadly, there shouldn’t be any chocolate. I think that’s the main thing that we really wanted to get across from this.”
Reach Brian Rosenthal at [email protected].
