This study tested the notion that the impact of clarity (i.e., structure) on learning is indirect and occurs, in part, through the reduction of cognitive load and subsequently through students' motivation to process instructional information. Two hundred fifty-two students were randomly assigned to one of two text-based lessons (clear or unclear)…

Democracy is in trouble. For the last 10 years, the number of democratizing countries dropped by almost half to 16, hosting a mere 4% of the global population. Faced with these global trends, as well as democracy's challenges during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, how can communication studies contribute to the study of civic…

Shared understanding is often achieved in communication interactions at the point in which the participants come to an agreement upon meaning. Without shared meaning, misunderstandings can lead to a breakdown in communication, and possibly failure on collaborative tasks. The purpose of the present study was to examine how students, preservice, and…

For decades, instructional communication scholars have relied predominantly on cross-sectional survey methods to generate empirical associations between effective teaching and student learning. These studies typically correlate students' perceptions of their instructor's teaching behaviors with subjective self-report assessments of their own…

This study examined how, and under what conditions, teacher clarity (i.e., structure/signaling) impacts student learning. One hundred and forty eight students reported their propensity to approach their studies with a mastery orientation and were randomly exposed to a lesson on persuasion that was either signaled or not. After the lesson, students…

Drawing on Lave & Wenger's concept of situated learning and Apple's premise that daily interactions at school construct what is considered legitimate knowledge, this article examines the discourses of teaching and learning circulating among students. Through interviews and open-ended, online surveys, we trace how nine different discourses of…

As opposed to the "place where you were forced to consider new ideas, to meet new people, to ask new questions, and to learn to think, to socialize, to imagine" (Fitzgerald, 2012, p. 20), millennial students view college as a financial rather than philosophical training ground (Berrett, 2015). Unfortunately, this perspective…

In response to the articles in this forum, the authors write that they were struck by the way most of the authors assumed that generations are stable entities characterized by readily identifiable factors, such as age, attitudes or circumstances. Following a constitutive philosophy of communication and instruction (Fassett & Warren, 2007;…

This study examined two effective teaching behaviors traditionally considered by instructional communication scholars to associate positively with students' academic experiences: instructor clarity and immediacy. Our study situated these teaching behaviors in a conditional process model that integrated two key assumptions about student learning:…