A study investigated the impact of teachers' use of immediacy behaviors in the college classroom. Behavior patterns of teachers often affect the behavior patterns of students. Teacher immediacy has been found to positively impact student cognitive, affective, and behavioral learning. Subjects, 70 students, enrolled in a communication course in a…

News media and public relations professionals have a unique relationship that paradoxically combines both mutual reliance and mutual distrust. An exploratory study utilized symbolic interactionism and in-depth interviewing with news media personnel from four sites (a newspaper, a radio station, a television station, and a university) and a public…

Conducted in the attribution-research paradigm of social psychology, a study examined whether human-computer interaction is fundamentally social (as in human-human interaction) or parasocial (as in human-television interaction). All 30 subjects (drawn from an undergraduate class on communication) were exposed to an identical interaction with…

A study tested effects of motives, communication style, and licensing (whether the practitioner is licensed or not) on public relations practitioners' reputations. Impression management theory suggests that perceived motives and self-interests may explain the poor reputation sometimes attributed to public relations practitioners. Subjects, 585…

A benchmark for conceptualizing the relationship between teaching, research, and service was provided 6 years ago by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The foundation maintained that the relationship between teaching, research and service was at present of benefit to no one, least of all the student. Therefore it put forth a…

This literature review examines prisons as organizations and prisons as cultures, for as J. M. Shafritz and J. S. Ott (1992) point out, "a strong organizational culture literally controls organizational behavior." The review investigates the research of prison, organizational, and communication scholars to see how prison cultures shape…

Instructors search for methods to enhance students' motivation and learning. Immediacy and relevance have been linked to increased motivation in the classroom. A study extended research by A. Frymier and G. Shulman (1995) that found immediacy and relevance to be associated with one another. A 2 (high and low immediacy) by 2 (high and low…

A pilot research project developed and tested an instrument to measure affective feelings about participating in task groups (grouphate) and to relate that instrument to what participants believed to be true about their group experiences. In 3 small group discussions, 15 members of an undergraduate research methods course identified…

Noting that research is inconclusive regarding the role of mediation in groups, this paper represents an initial attempt to integrate specific communication skills into the teaching of mediation. The paper begins with a literature review investigating literature on communication competence during conflict to establish a foundation for the basic…

An ethnographic study examined the culture of the Chinese students and scholars in America with a specific focus on their experiences in the cultural adaptation process. Subjects were three Chinese nationals (one female and two males) living in the area of a large midwestern university. Subjects were interviewed for about an hour each, with…

A study investigated who students think of when they are faced with the issues of relationships during a basic communication course--their friends from high school, their new friends from college, a parent, or a sibling. Subjects, 70 women and 41 men enrolled in a hybrid basic communication course, completed a relationship questionnaire. Results…

A study identified the verbal and nonverbal behaviors that people associate with flirting as opposed to sexual harassment, determined whether people could successfully distinguish between flirting and sexual harassment, and examined the relationship between variables that might affect the first two objectives. Subjects, 57 females and 32 males…

A study explored the possibility for the use of a modification of the Stroop test (a cognitive instrument that relies on the production of spontaneous responses) as a selection screening instrument in programs for students with public speaking anxiety. Subjects, 44 students in the special public speaking anxiety sections and 63 students enrolled…

A study of two teachers and two students at a large midwestern university examined student-teacher communication during individual conferences concerning student writing. Results may surprise even those composition scholars familiar with the research of Sommers (1982), Hayes and Daiker (1984) and Sperling and Freedman (1987), which suggested that…

With certifying end-of-program achievement as their goal, a group of educators conducted a pilot assessment program at Northeast Missouri State University in 1992. The program called for the videotaping of each student's third speech to be assessed by outside judges. The present study attempted to determine if videotaping and self-evaluation…