Dr. Fox effect

The Dr. Fox effect is a correlation observed between teacher expressiveness, content coverage, student evaluation and student achievement. This effect also allows insight to other related effects, such as those discussed below, and relationships between student achievement and evaluations of the teacher.

The original experiment was conducted at the University of Southern California School of Medicine in 1970 in which two speakers gave lectures to a classroom of MDs and PhDs (psychiatrists and psychologists) on an irrelevant topic. The topic, "Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education", was chosen to eliminate the factor that the students being lectured may know information about the actual subject. Students were divided into two separate classrooms; one classroom would be lectured by an actual scientist and the other by an actor who was given the identity "Dr. Myron L. Fox", a graduate of Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

In the first half of the study the actor was instructed to teach his material in a more monotoned and inexpressive voice. This lecture was then compared to the control lecture by the scientist. After the lectures, the students were tested on the information they had learned and the students who attended the lecture taught by the scientist learned more about the material, and performed better on the examination.

However, when both "Dr. Myron L. Fox" and the scientist presented their material in an engaging, expressive, and enthusiastic manner, the students rated Dr. Fox just as highly as the genuine professor. This lack of correlation between content-coverage and ratings under conditions of high expressiveness became known as the Dr. Fox Effect.

In a critique of student evaluations of teaching, professor of law Deborah Merritt summarized the Dr. Fox Effect as it was observed in the first experiments: "The experimenters created a meaningless lecture on 'Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education,' and coached the actor to deliver it 'with an excessive use of double talk, neologisms, non sequiturs, and contradictory statements.' At the same time, the researchers encouraged the actor to adopt a lively demeanor, convey warmth toward his audience, and intersperse his nonsensical comments with humor. ... The actor fooled not just one, but three separate audiences of professional and graduate students. Despite the emptiness of his lecture, fifty-five psychiatrists, psychologists, educators, graduate students, and other professionals produced evaluations of Dr. Fox that were overwhelmingly positive. ... The disturbing feature of the Dr. Fox study, as the experimenters noted, is that Fox’s nonverbal behaviors so completely masked a meaningless, jargon-filled, and confused presentation."

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