Investigates how 4 different information-processing goals, varying on the dimensions of effortful versus effortless and impression-driven versus non-impression-driven processing, and individual difference in political sophistication affect the depth at which undergraduate students process candidate information and their decision-making strategies.…

Suggests that narrative discourse helped a management team resolve conflict, influence corporate decisions, and unify the group. Argues managers' preference for collectively constructed narrative reasoning reflected their beliefs that narrative conveyed contextual complexities and helped interpret other types of evidence. Shows how through…

Investigates the relationship between nonverbal behaviors of immediacy and dominance on teachers' initial impressions of trust toward a supervisor. Notes that supervisor immediacy resulted in higher perceptions of trust than supervisor dominance, and immediacy also rated higher on measures of appropriateness and effectiveness than dominance.…

Explores the relationships among teacher characteristics and perceived caring. Gives a description of characteristics or behaviors that make teachers effective. Notes the students' perception of their teachers' caring and gives a prediction of teacher caring. (SG)

Reports several years of instructional design work organized by an interest in the identification of students' preinstructional beliefs and the use of argumentative discussion as instructional interventions in an introductory communication research methods course. Concludes that students' preinstructional beliefs interfere with learning of…

For years, instructional communication researchers have been advising teachers about the best classroom communication methods to achieve the greatest levels of student learning and motivation. However, traditional students (i.e., between the ages of 18 and 23) have consistently been the focus of this research. Given that over 43% of today's…

This study investigated the use of computer-based intervention for enhancing communication functions of children with autism. The software program was developed based on daily life activities in the areas of play, food, and hygiene. The following variables were investigated: delayed echolalia, immediate echolalia, irrelevant speech, relevant…

Although most focus group theorists consider interaction to be a defining feature of focus groups, the influence that occurs through this interaction has been under-theorized. We argue that two important forms of influence may occur: influence on people's beliefs about the substantive issues under discussion and influence on self-efficacy beliefs.…

When speakers repair speech errors, they plan the repair in the context of an abandoned word (the error) that is usually similar in meaning or form. Two picture-naming experiments tested whether the error's lexical representations influence repair planning. Context pictures were sometimes replaced with target pictures; the picture names were…

A 20th-century discipline in American universities, communication has struggled with questions of academic identity: generically, as to whether it is a "humanities" or a "social science", a "practice" or a "technology", and theoretically, as to what sorts of axioms, theorems, research methods or logics, and problems should form its core. This…

It is often assumed that online collaborative learning is inclusive of diversity. In this exploratory paper, I challenge this notion by developing a theory which proposes that inclusion occurs through congruence between learners' social identities and the identities implicitly supported through the interactions in a particular community. To build…

A study which replicated previous research focused on the perceived affiliative communication behaviors of teachers within the classroom, their relationship to student learning, and the interrelationship among those behaviors. Six hypotheses were formulated based on already published literature. These hypotheses suggest that student perceptions of…

In a multicase study, adolescents at five culturally diverse sites across the United States engaged in face-to-face interactions as they reflected and reported on their perceptions of their own and other students' experiences in discussing regularly assigned content area texts. A social constructionist perspective provided the framework for the…

A preliminary study identified areas of success and impact of a peer mediation program to be implemented in 60 middle and senior high schools in the Philadelphia Public School District during the 1993-1996 academic year periods. During the 1992-1994 period, 719 students and adults received peer mediation training. Data were collected from…

Predicating that undergraduate students' judgments of teaching ability are based on perceptions of the instructor's linguistic nonstandardness rather than on actual (or manipulated) language patterns, a study examined differences among students' perceptions of non-native English-speaking instructors (NNSI). Photographs of either a Chinese, a…