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Comment by throwaway2245 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I would be really interested in such an experiment - testing whether cookies or other foods boost retention of material or test scores. Maybe feeding the brain some sugar or dulling any hunger pains is a net benefit for having some simple snacks during lectures.

I agree. When I teach intro computer programming to law students I often provide snacks, because I think it makes the class more effective.

Did you objectively test effectiveness?

> I THINK it makes the class more effective.

Why would you assume cookies cause learning causes high ratings instead of occam's razor cookies cause high ratings?

I think the article is talking about just eval day, but for sake of argument:

I learn better when im not hungry.

There is also some research that suggests chewing helps learning https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/acp.3467

Because I've been in classes when I'm hungry, and I've been in classes which had some social bonding element, and I know which classes I learned more from.

During a class, especially one that touches on medical regulations, there's a lot of state information that needs to be transmitted during learning, so you'd expect cookies would help with that. j/k

NGL if it wasn't for the NIH link my first guess would have been it was about cookies being used for training ML via captchas.

It's a little unclear from the phrasing, but cookies are provided only in the session of the course where the evaluation is performed (note the phrasing "course session", not "course"). Also, more importantly, even "teaching materials" are rated higher despite being exactly the same in the cookie and non-cookie courses.

The full article also seems to indicate cookies had no effect on test scores; see this Twitter thread, which is where I found this link.

https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1318737313497812996

> "teaching materials" are rated higher despite being exactly the same in the cookie and non-cookie courses.

Your experience of the same teaching materials could be substantially different in a class with cookies - in a more informal atmosphere, students are more likely to discuss the purpose of the materials and therefore have a better insight into their value.

(The atmosphere this creates is also likely to persist over multiple sessions).

> cookies are provided only in the session of the course where the evaluation is performed (note the phrasing "course session", not "course").

I agree that would be relevant, but the Methods as it is written contradicts this. It says cookies are provided during a "course session" and the evaluation happens "after the course" (the implication is that this is not during a course session)

Please read the full report.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29956364/

> The cookie groups were provided with 500 g of cookies at the beginning of the session; this corresponded to an over‐supply of cookies to avoid limiting students to taking one cookie only. The teachers were instructed to comment on the availability of the cookies only by saying: ‘I've brought some chocolate biscuits.’ Teachers were allowed to eat one chocolate cookie themselves to break any reservations about taking the first cookie. The control groups received no chocolate cookies.

> If students brought cookies or other sweets for their group, the teachers were instructed to report this to the study group.

> At the end of the session, all students were asked to fill in the anonymous end‐of‐session evaluation form. While the students answered the questions, the teachers were instructed to leave the room. The forms were collected in a ballot box. After all students had left the room, cookie consumption was determined by subtracting the weight of the remaining cookies from 500 g.

They should have had a cookie when writing and proof-reading the Abstract, in that case.

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