Information spreads online at a much faster rate than ever before, often without being confirmed by trustworthy sources. Students must be able to evaluate the online source and the online source's information for accuracy and credibility. In public speaking, argumentation, and persuasion classes (among others), students are taught to use confirmed…

The White House will soon unveil a final version of its "college scorecard"--an online tool giving college-bound students and their families a hype-free snapshot of reliable information about any U.S. campus: real costs, graduation rates, student debt statistics, and earning potential of graduates. The college scorecard is a good idea…

Most business communication textbooks treat "unfavorable" communications as written documents--denials of credit, collection requests, rejections for employment, inability to meet deadlines, etc. These written "unfavorable" documents are no longer actually written by most employees. In fact, many of these communications are computer generated and…

Most communication research on bad news messages focuses on crisis communication, where attention is often limited to image repair strategies. The authors argue that a key indicator of an organization's effectiveness in communicating "bad news" messages is its organizational culture. Developing an organizational culture that values positive…

Objective: Students will develop positive attitudes toward communication research by linking new values and principles with the familiar values and principles contained in children's literature. Course: Communication Research Methods.

Journal citations are increasingly used as indicators of the impact of scholarly work. Because many communication journals are not included in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), SSCI impact factors are potentially misleading for communication journals. The current paper reports a citation analysis of 30 communication journals based on…

The present theoretical paper presents a case for the use of narrative (i.e., fictional written text) in science education as a way of making science meaningful, relevant, and accessible to the public. Grounded in literature pointing to the value of narrative in supporting learning and the need to explore new modes of communicating science, this…

This article presents the authors' response to Hewes's (1986, 1996, 2009) models of communication effects on small group outcomes. As sophisticated and thoughtful as Hewes's new model is, however, the authors take issue with it. For one, there is reason to question whether his approach is feasible. For another, his models are not founded on solid…

This article describes how 2 classrooms of 4-year-old children incorporated popular media (cartoons, television shows, video games, movies, and music) into their conversations with peers during writing. The findings assert that (a) children naturally incorporate popular culture into their writing, (b) children include popular culture in their…

Cooperative learning has increasingly become a popular form of active pedagogy employed in academic institutions. This case study explores the relationship between cooperative learning and academic performance in higher education, specifically in the field of communication. Findings from a questionnaire administered to undergraduate students in a…

This article presents the author's response to Professor Hewes's "The Influence of Communication Processes on Group Outcomes: Antithesis and Thesis." The author believes that Hewes could have been more helpful to the reader and to those who are apt to find inspiration in the steps he has taken in his essay to promote a "return to basic theorizing…

It is well-established that language skills are amongst the best predictors of educational success. Consistent with this, findings from a population-based longitudinal study of parents and children in the UK indicate that language development at the age of two years predicts children's performance on entering primary school. Moreover, children who…

As a means to involve the public in research, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) established the Partners in Research Program and solicited research grant applications from academic/scientific institutions and community organizations that proposed to forge partnerships: (a) to study methods and strategies to engage and inform the public…

The recent increase in short messaging system (SMS) text messaging, often using abbreviated, non-conventional "textisms" (e.g. "2nite"), in school-aged children has raised fears of negative consequences of such technology for literacy. The current research used a paradigm developed by Dixon and Kaminska, who showed that exposure to phonetically…

Has research by communication scholars made a difference in the practices or outcomes of communication in society? The author's answer to this question is based on her belief that there are three distinct ways in which communication research has made a difference, not all of which fit the traditional definitions of translational research. To…