Students learn more from attractive teachers – even in online courses - Kate Irby, Sacramento Bee

A new study shows that not only are attractive teachers rated more favorably by their students, but students might actually learn more from them. University of Nevada researchers took 131 university students, 86 women and 45 men with an average age of 20, and had them listen to a 20-minute audio lecture for an introductory physics course. While students listened to the online lecture, each had a photo of their “instructor” displayed on the screen. For 62 students, the picture was of an unattractive person, while the remaining 69 had a highly attractive person. Attractive instructors were overall rated higher than unattractive ones, and the male attractive instructors were rated higher than the female ones. Further, students with attractive instructors scored better on the test than those with unattractive instructors. http://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article98086112.html