Instructors tell stories for pedagogical reasons, but not all classroom stories are necessarily relevant to students and their learning. This study examined how instructors tell stories in ways that students find relevant or irrelevant to their lives. Participants were 388 undergraduate students who responded to an open-ended survey asking them to…

The history of the academic discipline of communication and the subsequent departments that followed are linked in some form or fashion to the evolution of the introductory communication course. Given the prominence and continued relevance of the introductory course in the communication discipline, researchers have conducted surveys for over 60…

Continuing a tradition dating back to 1968, this tenth study in a longitudinal series of surveys of the basic communication course has two goals: (1) to provide descriptive information about the basic course contemporarily and over time; and (2) to propose a framework for interpreting the impact of the extraordinary national and international…

This study explores how introductory news writing textbooks address issues surrounding emotional labor and its consequences, both for journalists and for those they interview. Eighteen of the highest-selling introductory news-writing textbooks were selected for qualitative analysis. Results showed the term and concept of emotional labor--the…

This study examined learning differences for students who were given instructor-provided examples during a lesson compared with student-generated examples. In an experiment, 348 students were exposed to an online lesson about fear appeals and were randomly assigned to either a condition where (a) examples of key concepts were provided by the…

This study gathered longitudinal and descriptive data on the nature of the basic communication course, continuing a tradition dating back to 1968. Now in its ninth iteration, convenience sampling and hard copy distribution of the survey instrument resulted in a total of 188 respondents (21 from two-year schools, 167 from four-year schools). This…

Communication education is concerned with the communicative aspects of teaching and learning in various situations and contexts. Although the historical roots of this area of inquiry date back to the classical study of rhetoric by the Greeks and Romans, this report focuses on the field's emergence as an important area of modern scholarly…

We examined the impact of instructor characteristics and student beliefs on students' decisions to enact instructional dissent using the Instructional Beliefs Model (IBM) as a framework. Students (N = 244) completed survey questionnaires assessing their perceptions of instructors' clarity, nonverbal immediacy, and affirming style, as well as their…

Organizations have changed dramatically over the last decade as globalization, new technology, and generational shifts shape almost every aspect of twenty-first century American society. Ideally, communication education would prepare students for experiences in the workplaces they will join after they graduate, but some have suggested that…

Using Petronio's communication privacy management theory, this study tested the degree to which content relevance and students' comfort with instructor disclosures moderated the association between instructor disclosures (i.e., frequency and appropriateness) and credibility (i.e., competence, trustworthiness, and goodwill) in the college…

The purpose of this experiment was to test the influence of mixed reviews appearing as computer-mediated word-of-mouth communication (WOM) on student perceptions of instructors (attractiveness and credibility) and attitudes toward learning course content (affective learning and state motivation). Using the heuristic-systematic processing model, it…

This eighth in a series of surveys of the basic communication course, begun in 1968, has as its purpose to gather longitudinal and descriptive data on the nature of the course. The latest study differs from past studies in that some of the results are presented comparatively for two-year and four-year colleges and universities. Samples for both…

Argues that the etic/emic distinction in teaching intercultural communication is an artificial one. Offers a framework which integrates both focuses as a basis for instruction. (MS)

Provides suggestions for teaching ethics including such issues as ethical standards, ethical values, and quality of ethics. (PD)

Provides a framework for an upper-level basic radio production course. Covers course structure, production assignments, equipment, studio/lab time, grading procedures, textbook and audiovisual materials. Emphasizes theory and practice to provide students with critical and production skills. (PD)