THE 55 SHEEPISH GOATS OF DR. FQ@XOUC: ac Collier

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The lecturer was Dr. Myron L. Fox, an authority on the application of mathematics
to human behavior. His topic: ''Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physical
Education''. His credentials: Impressive. His audience: 55 medical educators,
psychologists, psychiatrists, and educational administrators.

The only problem with the above scene, which actually took place, was that
Dr. Myron L. Fox was a fraud - a professional actor decked out with phony degrees
and publications to seem respectable.

He had been coached to present his topic and conduct the question-and-answer period
"With an excessive use of doubletalk, niologisms and non sequiturs, and contradic-
tory statements".

"All this was to be interspersed with parenthetical humor and meaningless refer-
ences to unrelated topics'', report his coaches.

Dr. Fox was part of an elaborate scheme devised by three medical educators to
find out whether the audience would be seduced by the style of the presentation.
They were. Not one of the 55 victims of the hoax recognized it. One of them
thought he had read Dr. Fox's publications. Even so, not all of the victims

were impressed with Dr. Fox. One thought the presentation was ''too intellectual";
another described him as being ''somewhat disorganized''. But overall, reported
the authors of the study, the 55 subjects ''responded favorably at a significant
level to an eight-item questionnaire concerning their attitudes toward the
lecture".

The authors of the study were Donald H. Naftulin, director of the division of
continuing education in psychiatry at the University of Southern California

John E. Ware, Jr., assistant professor of medical education at Southern |1linois
University; and Frank A. Donnelly, instructor in psychiatry at the University of
Southern California. Their hypothesis was that given a sufficiently ''impressive''
lecturer and environment for the lecture, ''even experienced educators participa-
ting in a new learning experience can be seduced into feeling satisfied that

they have learned, despite irrelevant, conflicting, and meaningless content con-
veyed by the lecturer''.

The 55 sujects of the survey were divided into three groups: 11 psychiatrists,
psychologists, and social-worker educators; 1] other psychiatric social workers;
and 33 educators and administrators enrolled in a graduate course in educational
philosophy. The three groups of learners in this study, all of whom had grown
up in the academic community and were experienced educators, obviously failed as
"competent crap detectors'', and were seduced by the style of Dr. Fox's presen-
tation, the authors report. They suggest that their study, while it may have
had some procedural inadequacies, raises serious questions about the use of
student ratings of faculty members. ''Student satisfaction with learning may
represent little more than the illusion of having learned'', they conclude.

Their report of the study, ''The Doctor Fox Lecture: A Paradigm of Educational
Seduction'', has been published in the Journal of Medical Education.

---Reprinted from the Simon Fraser University newspaper which reprinted it from
The Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct.15, 1973.

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