This paper examines the overall effect of the 1976 presidential debates on the public's learning about issues and candidates, identifying several factors that are linked to campaign learning and that explain individual differences in the amount of learning that occurred from watching the debates. Findings presented in this paper are based on an…

The key question underlying this study was: What does the untrained population know about public speaking? The study thus focused on resolving the conflict between folk speech theory, or knowledge that students gain informally, and formal academic speech theory. An Inventory of Public Speaking Principles was devised to test six hypotheses which…