Courses: Presentational courses such as Public Speaking, Interviewing, Business and Professional, Persuasion, Interpersonal; any course where civility may be promoted in the classroom. Objectives: At the end of this single-class activity, students will have an understanding of civility in order to: (1) identify civility and consequences of…

Learning to "become doctor" requires PhD candidates to undertake progressive public displays--material and social--of knowledge. Knowledge in doctoral pedagogy is primarily realised textually, with speaking and writing remaining as the primary assessment rubrics of progress and of the qualification. Participating textually begins, in a…

Courses: Introduction to Communication, Public Speaking, Persuasion, Business Communication. Objective: This activity increases students' understanding of audience adaptation and improves their ability to adapt presentations to specific audiences.

This study aims to investigate whether using scaffolded instructions can enhance students' speaking skills and build up their confidence. The participants were twelve first-year undergraduate students who attended a self-study club called "Let's Speak". The objective of the club is to enable students to make effective presentations and…

A unit operations laboratory course was significantly modified to be an open-ended problem-based experience with an emphasis on teamwork and communication skills. Students were surveyed to assess gains in engineering self-efficacy as well as to indicate which course structure components were most beneficial to learning. Students showed significant…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether college students' attitudes toward group work could be influenced by thoughtful group project design. Undergraduate students (N = 123) in a lifespan human development course were assigned to groups and asked to create a smartphone app for a specific life stage. The authors utilized a convergent…

This study investigated how the use of structured participation, specifically group presentation roles, supported more equitable participation in doing and learning mathematics. We analyzed videos of two lessons focused on radius, diameter, circumference, and area of circles in which students worked in small groups in a STEM project-based geometry…

This is the second of two Directions articles, which together offer guidance to help the reader gain the maximum benefit from participating in institutional and national multi-disciplinary undergraduate research conferences. The earlier article introduced undergraduate research conferences, summarized the key benefits of participating in such…

In this study, we introduce new insights into prosodic analyses as an emerging method to study what happens in classrooms interactions. We claim that the prosodic aspects (features of speech such as intonation, volume and pace) of talk are important, but under-represented in the learning sciences. These prosodic aspects may be used to complement,…

Courses: Communication Theory, Nonverbal Communication, Public Speaking. Objective: At the end of this activity, students should be able to define key components of expectancy violations theory and apply the theory to analyze violations that occurred in Clint Eastwood's speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

Objective: Communication skills are important, but the evaluation of these skills in the medical curriculum remains inconsistent. The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between the communication skills scores of junior medical students following curricula with different module evaluations and the clinical interview performance of…

The Indian Express, an English Daily, investigated the progression of 86 national school Board toppers (51 men and 35 women) during the two-decade of 1996-2015. The investigation consisted of toppers of Class X and XII (from the Central Board of Secondary Education and the Council for Indian School Certificate Examinations). It was published in…

While many studies indicate that "virtual exchanges" also known as telecollaboration are useful for developing intercultural communicative competence, there is a paucity of research on how learners acquire new knowledge related to their own culture and society before interacting with online foreign exchange partners. This study explores…

Increased trade, commerce and business transactions at the international level are placing a substantial demand upon working professionals and college students who must learn English, the lingua franca of international business, in order to thrive in a competitive global workplace. Learning English as a second language (L2) can be a daunting task…

Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) programs connect students at campuses in two or more different countries to investigate global realities from a cross-cultural perspective through asynchronous (e.g., digital forums) and/or synchronous (e.g., Zoom meetings) digital engagement. As many scholars have noted, COIL collaborations…