In an essay featured in "Inside Higher Ed," Dever and Justice (2020) called for university faculty to utilize empathy when teaching uncertain, frightened students during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors offered specific strategies for doing so, suggesting that "strict deadlines aren't going to cut it." Many students are…

Guided by rhetorical and relational goals theory, this study explores medical students' preferences for effective teaching using a "build-a-professor" design. Using a budget methodology, medical students (N = 177) created their ideal clinical or nonclinical medical school educator by prioritizing 10 teaching behaviors and characteristics…

The author recounts her experiences as a South Asian-immigrant teaching public-speaking classes at an American higher education institution. In this paper, she illustrates how she puts to use her immigrant experience by accessing a storytelling mode of teaching and learning rooted in a postcolonial ethos. She humanizes, demystifies, and strives to…

Could teacher communication behaviors generally assumed to be positive ever be detrimental to student realization of particular outcomes? This essay argues for increased scholarly attention to this question. The authors advocate a research agenda that explores the potential "downside" of teacher communication behaviors (TCBs);…

Guided by Rhetorical and Relational Goals Theory, this study examined college students' preferences for effective teaching behaviors and characteristics. Students (n = 209) articulated qualities in their ideal instructor by prioritizing 10 instructional behaviors and characteristics from the rhetorical and relational traditions (assertive,…

This article reports the findings of two meta-analyses that explored the relationship between teacher clarity and student learning. Combined, the results suggest that teacher clarity has a larger effect for student affective learning than for cognitive learning. However, neither the effects for cognitive learning nor affective learning were…

This study was conducted to determine how various teaching behaviors influence students' emotional and cognitive experiences in class, and how these experiences relate to students' use of cell phones while considering contextual factors that might influence this outcome. Two hundred and seventy-four students responded to questions regarding their…

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:…

This article presents research to delineate the construct of instructor strategic ambiguity (ISA) and develop a measure. The first study analyzed instructor uses of ambiguity, identified 18 strategies, and classified them into four categories. The second study developed an Instructor Strategic Ambiguity Measure (ISAM) for the college classroom.…

Guided by broaden-and-build theory and emotional response theory, we examined college students' emotional outcomes in the classroom (i.e., emotional interest, emotional support, emotion work, emotional valence) as a function of teacher confirmation (i.e., responding to questions, demonstrating interest, teaching style). Participants were 159…

Students and instructors acknowledge the importance of the instructor-student relationship in the classroom. Despite the importance of the instructor-student interpersonal relationship, there can also be unexpected or undesirable outcomes associated with relational teaching. Using the theoretical framework of leader-member exchange, we explored…

The purpose of this study was to (a) identify perceived triggering agents of student dissent in the college classroom, (b) determine common target receivers of dissent, and (c) reveal the types of dissent that students enact based on their intentional motives and construction of message content. Participants were 123 undergraduate students who…

This paper proposes the Instructional Humor Processing Theory (IHPT), a theory that incorporates elements of incongruity-resolution theory, disposition theory, and the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) of persuasion. IHPT is proposed and offered as an explanation for why some types of instructor-generated humor result in increased student…

There is much disagreement among instructional communication scholars concerning the appropriate means to measure cognitive learning. Significant differences have emerged between studies that rely on perceptual versus performance measures of learning and the issue has been the subject of much recent debate in research on teacher immediacy. The…

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.…