In our daily activities we are bombarded with persuasive messages. From advertising on mass and social media to interactions with friends, we are constantly exposed to attempts to change or reinforce our attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors. Conversely, we routinely attempt to influence others and gain their compliance through persuasive…

Many faculty members demonstrate unwavering resistance to adopting research-based instructional strategies. This phenomenon commonly fits with motivated reasoning, whereby a person feels threatened by persuasion to change, leading to overtly defensive and sometimes disruptive behaviors and refusal. Changing away from established practices may…

Courses: Public Speaking, Business and Professional Communication, Persuasion, or any other skill-based oral communication course. Objectives: Students will practice the development and demonstration of persuasive arguments in this single-class social judgment theory activity to improve their ability to change resistant audience attitudes.

Courses: This semester-long project is suited for courses on persuasion, diversity, social media, communication and technology, social advocacy, service-learning, or social justice. Objective: This assignment challenges students to research, design, launch, maintain, and assess an anti-hate social media campaign.

Language operates according to rules. Rules mean prediction. The application of these language rules to persuasive campaigns through linguistic technology can result in major gains in advertising, political and marketing outcomes. For qualitative researchers in communications, marketing and messaging, one area of persuasive language technology can…

Educators often focus on enhancing student motivation and engagement. This article describes an activity with these aims, in which undergraduates (a) learn about theories and research on means of persuasion and (b) in small groups design and record a public service announcement (PSA) video, write a brief paper that outlines the theories used to…

Social Judgment Theory is a way to explain when persuasive messages are most likely to succeed and how people make judgments about them. This theory is often covered in communication theory and persuasion courses, but is also applicable when discussing persuasion in basic speech and introductory communication courses. Social Judgment Theory…

In this article, the author describes the seemingly all-powerful Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and the negative effects of its single-minded obsession with "diversity." He suggests ways in which true diversity of viewpoint might be injected into law school education. The key is to raise awareness and apply the same standards to all…

The Social Intuitionist Model (SIM) of moral reasoning proposed by Jon Haidt and colleagues (Haidt, 2001; Haidt & Bjorklund, 2006) is criticized on the grounds that (1) its conclusions concerning moral reasoning are unwarranted by research reporting 'dumbfounded' responses by subjects whose initial judgments are challenged and judgments…

Thirty-seven superintendents lead public school divisions in the Province of Manitoba; their role is to implement the policies set out by the Board of Trustees. In a period of rapid educational change and growth in Manitoba, superintendents are increasingly concerned with rural/urban issues; the fallout from recent school division amalgamations;…

Advocacy begins with an assumption that if a number of community members are suffering, then there must be something wrong, not with the individual members, but with the community as a whole; therefore, the community must be changed to help alleviate that suffering. Advocacy creates a platform for change by allowing individuals to begin the…

Alexander and her colleagues proposed "teaching as persuasion" as a guiding metaphor for conceptual change pedagogy (Alexander, Fives, Buehl, & Mulhern, 2002). However, there is reason to suspect that the term persuasion can have negative connotations for some individuals ( Dole & Sinatra, 1999; Murphy, 2001). Therefore, we examined 182 primarily…

Although use is a core construct in the field of evaluation, neither the change processes through which evaluation affects attitudes, beliefs, and actions, nor the interim outcomes that lie between the evaluation and its ultimate goal--social betterment--have been sufficiently developed. We draw a number of these change mechanisms, such as…

For decades, scholars have worked to understand the precise manner in which messages affect attitudes and ultimately behaviors. The dominant paradigm suggests that there are two methods or routes to attitude change, one based on careful consideration of the messages and the other based on simple decision rules, often referred to as heuristics…

Against the wider background of increasing interest in pupil voice, this article gives examples of the student involvement activity in the largest of the National College of School Leadership (NCSL) development and enquiry initiatives: the Networked Learning Communities project. In programme-level research, student voice and participation were…