This article is about college education and not giftedness per se, but I think it is interesting and that there is not enough assessment of how much college students are learning.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/...ts-dont-learn-more-charismatic-lecturersCharisma Doesn't Count
May 30, 2013
By Chris Parr for Times Higher Education
Imagine you receive the same lecture twice: once from a charismatic lecturer speaking fluently without notes and maintaining eye contact; and again from a hesitant speaker, slumped over her notes and stumbling over her words. Which is better?
In terms of what you learn there is surprisingly little to choose between the two, according to a team of psychologists.
The researchers asked two groups of students to sit through the same lecture delivered in radically different styles. When asked afterward how much they felt they had learned, those who had experienced the more accomplished performance believed they had learned more than the second group. However, when tested, there was little difference found between them, with those attending the "better" lecture barely outperforming their poorly taught peers.
"The fluent instructor was rated significantly higher than the disfluent instructor on traditional instructor evaluation questions, such as preparedness and effectiveness," say the researchers, in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. "However, lecture fluency did not significantly affect the amount of information learned."
Students' perceptions appear to be based "on lecture fluency and not on actual learning," concludes the paper, titled "Appearances Can Be Deceiving: Instructor Fluency Increases Perceptions of Learning Without Increasing Actual Learning." As a result, those who received the impressive lecture were disappointed with their test scores, whereas the attainment of those in the other group was more in line with their expectations.
The paper is at
http://sites.williams.edu/nk2/files/2011/08/Carpenter.Wilford.Kornell.Mullaney.inpress1.pdf . The authors say their findings are consistent with previous research:
The instructor evaluation data are in line with research showing that students’
evaluations can be sensitive to an instructor’s behavioral cues that may not relate to
lecture content. In research on the “Dr. Fox Effect,” (e.g., Naftulin, Ware, & Donnelly,
1973), students’ evaluations of an instructor were sensitive to the amount of information
contained in a lecture (with higher evaluations assigned to lectures that contain greater
coverage of the topic) when the lecturer displayed low expressiveness. When the lecturer
covered the same topic with greater enthusiasm, friendliness, humor, etc., students’
evaluations of instructors were high and did not vary as a function of content (e.g., Ware
& Williams, 1975; Williams & Ware, 1976, 1977). An instructor’s level of
expressiveness may therefore mask the effects of important factors, such as lecture
content, that could directly affect learning.
