Articles published in "Communication Education" ("CE") from 2000 to 2013 yielded four major themes: teacher/instructor to student communication, public speaking, technology, and identity. An analysis of the articles within each major theme revealed a notable absence of research investigating the experiences of students of color…

Instructors do not always meet students' expectations. Instead, they may be perceived as engaging in misbehaviors or unfair teaching practices that ultimately lead to student dissatisfaction. When this happens, students have a variety of options including dissenting rhetorically. Though much is known about why students dissent, in the current…

This research comprises two studies examining the antecedents and outcomes of psychological reactance in teacher requests in the instructional context. In Study 1 we investigated the mediating role of reactance in the relationship of perceived teacher request politeness and teacher-student relationship distance with student resistance intention.…

This study offers a systematic analysis of uncertainty in communication education by examining communication goals and challenges in the context of collaborative creative problem-solving in engineering assignments. Engineering design projects are seen as having the potential to help K-12 students learn to deal with uncertainty as well as a means…

Although scholars from various fields now argue that emotion is a critical resource for individuals as they learn and make sense of information, the topic is only just emerging as a sustained area of emphasis for instructional communication scholars. Using a sample of 752 students from three universities, we tested a predictive model exploring how…

This study examined students' perceived understanding as a mediator of the relationship between student perceptions of teacher clarity, nonverbal immediacy cues, and learner empowerment (i.e., meaningfulness, competence, and impact). Participants included 261 undergraduate students who completed survey instruments. Results of structural equation…

The primary goal of this project is to provide a summary of extant research regarding humor in the classroom, with an emphasis on identifying and explaining inconsistencies in research findings and offering new directions for future studies in this area. First, the definitions, functions, and main theories of humor are reviewed. Next, the paper…

Instructors routinely provide feedback for students concerning the work the students produce as part of a classroom course. Although such information is required of instructors and expected by students, the communication of feedback creates a potentially face-threatening interaction in which the student's self-esteem may be diminished and/or the…

This article presents the Instructional Beliefs Model which forwards that teacher behaviors, student characteristics, and course-specific structural issues combine to influence students' instructional beliefs. Through these instructional beliefs, the first-order variables influence student learning outcomes. Three studies were conducted to…

Similar to many courses in communication, oral communication is central to the learning goals in the discipline of design. Design critiques, the primary communication activity in design classrooms, occur in every studio course multiple times. One key feature of the critique, as an oral genre, is the amount of time and emphasis placed on feedback.…

Guided by Giddens' structuration theory, this study highlights structures that both enable and constrain nonnative English-speaking teachers and students in American college classrooms. Before international teaching assistants (ITAs) step into their American classrooms, several semishaped class structures are already in place: students (mostly…

This study tested two theoretical models of instructor credibility as a potential mediator between instructors' classroom communication behaviors (nonverbal immediacy, enthusiasm, and homophily) and students' intentions to persist in college. Participants included 570 undergraduate students from three institutions in the South-Central United…

Although scholars from across the field of communication have highlighted the importance of emotion in interpersonal relationships, persuasive messages, and organizations, the topic has yet to receive systematic attention from scholars who study classroom communication. Using interdisciplinary literature from communication and other fields as a…

This study compared Korean students in South Korea and Korean students in the US regarding their perceptions of instructor decision authority and verbal and nonverbal immediacy. Korean students reported higher instructor decision authority and lower levels of instructor verbal and nonverbal immediacy in Korean classrooms than in US classrooms.…

Theoretical perspectives on the efficacy of instructional feedback suggest that there should be significant variation in students' perceptions of and responses to feedback messages. Yet, little effort has been made to either uncover the perceptual dimensions by which students evaluate feedback, or to measure students' perceptions of feedback. The…