Proactive teachers do not simply react to student behavior but use their thorough understanding of classroom communication to shape the pattern of class interaction. Proactive teachers are characterized by their recognition of the mutual influence of teachers and students in the learning process, their participation in social perspective taking,…

A survey was conducted by the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) to create a profile of the profession in 1983. Questionnaires were sent in December 1982 to 1,700 randomly selected members of the IABC in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Among the results are the following: (1) the typical American…

To determine the influence of the health care provider's gender and profession on readers' memory for health information, 48 university students were asked to read a three page article on heart attacks that was attributed to either (1) a female nurse, (2) a male nurse, (3) a female physician, or (4) a male physician. After reading the article, the…

Effective communication between teachers and students is a very complex skill. In order to draw conclusions about effective youth-adult relationships, four research studies (Adolescent-Adult Relationships; Best and Poorest Junior High School Student-Teacher Relationships; Elementary School Teachers' Perceptions; and Comparison of Two Good…

The use of an electronic feedback system, the Anonymous Audience Response System (AARS), in educational decision making is described, and the results of use studies in North Carolina are discussed. The AARS insures anonymity of an individual participant's responses, and at the same time, provides immediate feedback of the group's collective…

Prompted by research showing that communication is one element that distinguishes teachers rated effective by students from those rated ineffective, a study was undertaken to develop a scale for assessing the perceived communication effectiveness of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). Two groups, one of undergraduate students and one of their…

To determine the effects of race and dialect in communication effectiveness, a study integrated research in referential communication with work on standard and black English, creating three hypotheses: that decoding within-race or within-dialect would be more effective than decoding across race or dialect, that decoding within any dialect would be…

A 2-year study of optimal structures for multimedia instruction is being conducted to provide experimentally validated guidelines for the design of computer-based instruction generation systems and for human instruction in a multimedia setting. In order to obtain for analysis a significant range of the possible discourse structures that occur in…

Demographic data were collected from college students and their graduate teaching assistant (GTA) instructors and analyzed for the impact of these characteristics on the students' ratings of teacher communication effectiveness. Data collected from the approximately 1,000 students and 60 GTAs included age, sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, home…

Pericles' Funeral Oration, delivered at a mass funeral for a number of Athenian soldiers who had died during an attack against their rival Sparta's allies, is an example of a form of rhetoric, epideictic, that functioned as a means of developing a sense of community. In order to make the mourners at the funeral believe the soldiers had died good,…

A study examined supervisor-subordinate relationships and the congruity of communicative expectations and experiences to determine how congruity was affected by time. Subjects, 117 employees comprising 106 subordinates and 11 first-line supervisors, were surveyed as to communication expectations and experiences with self and with other, as well as…

The "Leadership Continuum" model developed in 1961 by R. Tannenbaum, I. Weschler, and F. Massarik clearly illustrates the ideas that management scholars like Frederick Taylor, V. A. Graicunas, James Worthy, Rensis Likert, and Frederick Thayer have posited concerning span of control and organizational structure. Each of these scholars…

The attention of Americans and their mass media to the lengthy hostage-taking episode known as the "Iran Hostage Crisis" was unprecedented, especially in light of the apparently limited significance of the hostage-taking as a geo-political event. A study used fantasy-theme analysis of print news coverage (news stories, editorials,…

A survey involving 98 speech communication majors enrolled in a leadership communication course at a large midwestern university was conducted to determine what students in the field of communication think regarding leadership. Respondents were asked for their opinions regarding the ideal traits of leaders, how leadership has changed in the last…

A study investigated the extent to which members of a state agency reported that they are comfortable talking about Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and the attendant topics of sex, homosexuality, intravenous drug use, death, and disease and the extent to which they use direct talk and indirect talk when they communicate about these…