Teacher greetings increase college students' test scores.(Report)

The current study is an extension of a previous investigation dealing with teacher greetings to students. The present investigation used teacher greetings with college students and academic performance (test scores). We report data using university students and in-class test performance. Students in introductory psychology who received teachers' personal recognition before class begins ("Hello", "I am glad you're in class today") did significantly better on a class test that day than the same students who did not receive such preclass attention. Pretest mean was 67.05% and posttest mean was 85.25%. There were 40 participants, (t(39) = 7.401, p

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Student evaluations are widely used in colleges in the USA (d'Apollonia & Abrami, 1997; Greenwald & Gillmore, 1997). One assumption underlying the use of student evaluations is that if evaluations improve teaching, students will get a better education, learn more which should be reflected in their test scores. In 1951 Carl Rogers (as cited in Nietzel, Bernstein, Kramer, & Milch, 2003) believed that the relationship between a therapist and a client was the single most important element in effective psychotherapy. Sidney Jourard pointed out that what applies to a therapist and client could also apply to teachers and students (Jourard, 1971).

The most effective teaching depends on establishing a good working relationship with students. With this in mind, it seems that one way to establish a positive relationship would be for the teacher to greet students at the door as they come to class and to show that the teacher is really interested in each student and is glad to see each student.

This is probably as true in college as it is in middle school. It is probably as true with emotionally stable college students as it is with problematic middle school students.

Besides the quality of teachers which might influence students test scores, there are other variables that might affect students' test score (i.e., students' GPAs, hours studied). One intervention that has been investigated in a limited context is teacher greetings. Allday and Pakurar (2007) demonstrated that teacher greetings affected on- task behavior of problematic middle school students. They usually failed to complete the task, slept in class, talked out and annoyed other students. Greetings increased their on-task behavior. Neither these authors nor anyone has examined the influence of greetings on in class academic (test) performance in older students at college.

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