When Instructors Self-Disclose but Misbehave: Conditional Effects on Student Engagement and Interest

This study examined the conditional influence of relevant instructor self-disclosure on student interest (cognitive, emotional) and engagement (silent-in-class, oral-in-class, thinking about course content, out-of-class). College student participants (N = 169) completed a questionnaire on their instructor’s disclosures and misbehaviors in class, and their own interest and engagement in a college course. The positive associations between relevant instructor self-disclosure with student interest and engagement were conditional; they were moderated by perceived instructor misbehaviors (antagonism, lectures). Overall, the positive associations were diminished for cognitive and emotional interest when instructors were antagonistic; these associations became nonsignificant, and then negative at higher levels of antagonism. Similarly, the positive associations were diminished for all four types of student engagement when instructors delivered boring and confusing lectures; these associations became nonsignificant at higher levels of lecture misbehaviors, and the associations for silent in-class and out-of-class engagement became negative at very high levels of lecture misbehaviors.     

Building Positive Learning Experiences through Pedagogical Research Guide Design

Abstract

Library research guides are traditionally designed in a pathfinder-style format by resource type. However, would a pedagogical-style guide, which moves students through the research process, better support the student learning experience? This study sought to answer the question: Which guide design best supports the student information literacy learning experience outside of a classroom setting? This article reports results of a usability study (n?=?22) of first-year to graduate students who interacted with either a pedagogical or pathfinder-style research guide through a simulated research assignment. Results indicate that, although there is no statistically significant performance difference between guide type, students using the pedagogical guide reported a more positive experience than those using the pathfinder guide. As a result, this led them to spend more time on, interact more with, and consult more resources on the research guide. Librarians who wish to enhance the usability of research guides may get greater student engagement by designing their guides pedagogically.     

Students’ Discrete Emotional Responses in the Classroom: Unraveling Relationships With Interest and Engagement

Recent instructional communication research reveals that the communication and emotional processes at play in the classroom can influence class-specific emotions experienced by students. Students’ enjoyment and pride were positively related to their emotional interest, while students’ enjoyment, hope, and pride were positively associated with their cognitive interest. While students’ anger and boredom were inversely related to their emotional interest, students who reported greater hopelessness and anger indicated decreases in cognitive interest. Students’ hope and pride were positively associated with their overall engagement behaviors. Anger, anxiety, shame, and boredom led students to report decreases in their engagement. Follow-up tests highlighted challenges in the assessment of specific emotional responses; exploratory factor analysis simplified the measurement of these variables and provided additional insight into expected relationships.     

The Relationship Between College Students' Self-Reports of Class Participation and Perceived Instructor Impressions

The purpose of this investigation was to identify the extent to which college students' self-reports of their in-class participation are related to their impressions of instructors (i.e., credibility, attractiveness, and homophily). Participants were 223 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory communication course at a large Mid-Atlantic university. Students' self-reports of their in-class participation were positively correlated with perceived instructor social attractiveness, physical attractiveness, background homophily, and attititude homophily, but not with perceived instructor competence, character, caring, and task attractiveness. Furthermore, class size, perceived instructor social attractiveness, and perceived instructor background homophily emerged as significant predictors of in-class participation.     

Authors@UF Campus Conversation Series: A Case Study

The Authors@UF program series emerged to showcase the scholarship and creativity of faculty, creating an intellectual forum within the academic library, and providing informal, extra-curriculum, academic engagement between students and faculty outside the classroom. This article identifies steps to launch an author program, and considerations in finding authors, locating the event, publicizing, budgeting, catering, selling books, and creating an off-shoot vehicle (i.e., “The Authors@UF Bookshelf”) to place University of Florida (UF) authors in the institutional repository. This new UF program embraced current academic library service trends, expanded roles for library liaisons, and advanced the library's fundamental role as an intellectual forum for the campus community.     

How Television Viewers Use Social Media to Engage with Programming: The Social Engagement Scale Development and Validation

This study investigated social television viewing behavior by introducing the social engagement construct and validating its measurement scale. A total of 655 social media users in 2 online consumer panels were sampled to complete the 3-stage research strategy. Through conceptualization and operationalization of social engagement, this study identified 4 underlying dimensions in social engagement, i.e., vertical involvement, diagonal interaction, horizontal intimacy, and horizontal influence. These 4 dimensions represent a continuum in which audiences’ social engagement behaviors range from a lower level (vertical involvement) to a higher level (horizontal influence). The theoretical and practical implications of the social engagement construct were also discussed.     

Part 10: Teacher Behaviors

Effective teachers place learners’ needs at the center of their efforts and find ways to bridge gaps between learning objectives and students’ prior knowledge and interests. Proven techniques to maximize student learning include encouraging questioning, provoking thought, connecting with students’ interests, expecting engagement, and communicating trust that students can succeed. Findings are presented from research on one-on-one instruction, making clear explanations, and giving effective feedback. The column concludes with guidelines for self-assessing librarians’ teaching effectiveness.     

Students’ Self-Determination as a Consequence of Instructor Misbehaviors

The study applied self-determination theory to examine detrimental effects of instructor misbehaviors in the college classroom. Participants were 223 undergraduate students who reported on their instructor’s antagonism and lecture misbehaviors in a course, along with their basic psychological need fulfillment (i.e., autonomy, competence, relatedness) and intrinsic motivation to learn. Results indicated that (a) lecture misbehaviors were more detrimental to students’ competence and relatedness than antagonism misbehaviors; and (b) students’ intrinsic motivation to learn was influenced by students’ basic psychological needs and instructor misbehaviors.     

Organizational newcomers: Temporary and regular employees,same‐sex and mixed‐sex superior‐subordinate dyads,supervisor influence techniques,subordinates communication satisfaction,and leader‐member exchange

This study examined the relationship between newly hired employees’ characteristics (i.e., temporary vs. regular employee, superior‐subordinate gender‐dyad combinations), supervisors initial tactics of influence, subordinate communication satisfaction, and quality of leader‐member exchange. Results from 148 (71 temporary) new hires indicated (a) employee characteristics were not significantly related to the leader‐member exchange, (b) supervisors initial use of prosocial influence tactics were significantly and positively related to the quality of leader‐member exchange, and (c) subordinates’ satisfaction with communication was significantly and positively related to the quality of leader‐member exchange.     

Audience Engagement,Reciprocity, and the Pursuit of Community Connectedness in Public Media Journalism

In light of the media industry’s growing focus on audience engagement, this article explores how online and offline forms of engagement unfold within journalism, based on a comparative case study of two American public media newsrooms. This study addresses gaps in the literature by (1) examining what engagement means for public media and (2) applying the concept of reciprocal journalism to evaluate the nature of reciprocity (direct, indirect, or sustained) in the give-and-take between journalists and their communities. Drawing on direct observation and in-depth interviews, this article shows how this emerging focus on engagement is driven by public media journalists’ desire to make their relationship with the public more enduring and mutually beneficial. We find that such journalists privilege offline modes of engagement (e.g., listening sessions and partnerships with local organizations) in hopes of building trust and strengthening ties with their community, more so than digital modes of engagement (e.g., social media) that are more directly tied to news publishing. Moreover, this case study reveals that public media organizations, in and through their engagement efforts, are distinguishing between the communities they cover in their reporting and the audiences they reach with their reporting.     

Therapy Dogs in Academic Libraries: A Way to Foster Student Engagement and Mitigate Self-Reported Stress during Finals

More and more modern academic libraries are turning to student engagement activities designed to welcome students into Academia, join a community of scholars, and avail themselves of the full range of resources and services that a university library can provide. One unusual, but inexpensive and highly effective method of engaging students is bringing therapy dogs into the library. This article begins by explaining how therapy dogs differ from other types of dogs and how to counter objections to library engagement activities involving canines. It then offers a research-based rationale for human-canine interaction that is consistent with an academic library's mission. Next, the article addresses the planning/implementation phase a student engagement event involving handler/therapy dog teams, reviews the literature on successful programs at various institutions, and offers guidance to others seeking to initiate a similar program. A project of this type depends upon collaboration among faculty members, college students, support staff, volunteers, and the larger community. Finally, the article highlights results from a questionnaire administered to 449 students during a sequence of three “de-stress during exam week” events. Overall, the survey data suggest that: (1) social media was the most effective means of advertising, (2) students strongly supported the continuation of the event, and (3) 95% of the student participants considered interaction with the therapy dogs to be a means of stress reduction.     

Welcoming Our Robot Overlords: Initial Expectations About Interaction With a Robot

This study examined the relationships between faculty workplace bullying with graduate students’ burnout and organizational citizenship behaviors. Graduate students (N = 272) completed a self-report questionnaire measuring the degree to which faculty bully them at work (i.e., through belittlement, punishment, managerial misconduct, exclusion) along with reports of their student burnout (i.e., exhaustion, cynicism, professional efficacy) and use of organizational citizenship behaviors (i.e., helping, civic virtue, sportsmanship). Results of canonical correlations revealed that faculty bullying was related positively to graduate student burnout and was related inversely to organizational citizenship behaviors.     

Assessing the Effects of Instructor Enthusiasm on Classroom Engagement,Learning Goal Orientation,and Academic Self-Efficacy

Enthusiasm is widely regarded as one of the most essential and desirable qualities and characteristics of effective teachers. This study is designed to assess the effects of teacher enthusiasm on student classroom engagement, learning goal orientation, and academic self-efficacy. Participants include 165 college students enrolled in basic communication classes. Results indicate that teacher enthusiasm is an effective predictor of student behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement, intrinsic goal orientation, and academic self-efficacy, but it is not a significant predictor of extrinsic goal orientation. Consequently, this study demonstrates the power of teacher enthusiasm in predicting and shaping students' behavior in the classroom.     

Assessing the Role of Peer Relationships in the Small Group Communication Course

Based on the typology posited by Kram and Isabella (1985) that identifies three peer relationships present in organizations (i.e., information, collegial, and special), this assessment examined the association between students' perceptions of their in-class group members and six group outcomes (i.e., grouphate, cohesion, relational satisfaction, consensus, affective learning, and cognitive learning). Participants included 248 undergraduate students enrolled in two sections of an introductory small group communication course. Results revealed that students who rated group members to be information peers, rather than collegial peers or special peers, reported higher levels of grouphate and lower levels of cohesion, relational satisfaction, consensus, and cognitive learning.     

Explaining Media Choice: The Role of Issue-Specific Engagement in Predicting Interest-Based and Partisan Selectivity

This study analyzes the predictors of 2 types of media selectivity: interest-based (i.e., choice of entertainment over politics) and partisan (i.e., choice of pro-attitudinal over counter-attitudinal or balanced news). Relying on a large survey-based experiment, we find that issue-specific engagement variables, including perceived issue understanding, issue importance, and issue attitude strength, predict interest-based and partisan selectivity above and beyond the influence of general political knowledge, news interest, and strength of political leanings. These results show that the drivers of selectivity are more complex than general political attributes; rather, they are contextual and reflect people’s engagement with particular issues.     

The relationship between student interest and teacher's use of behavior alteration techniques

Two hundred and nine college students completed surveys that pertained to their perceptions of teacher behaviors (BATs) and their level of interest. Interest was measured using the Frymier, Shulman, and Houser (1996) Learner Empowerment Scale. Not only do the results indicate that pro‐social teacher behaviors are related to increased levels of student interest, but results show that different teacher behaviors are differentially related to the separate dimensions of interest. This supports earlier assertions by Weber, Martin and Patterson (2001) that interest is a multifaceted construct providing teachers with different avenues to influence their students’ affective responses.     

Dimensions of Instructor Disclosure: Implications for Rhetorical and Relational Goals of Instruction

There are an array of reasons why instructors view personal disclosures as beneficial for the classroom, including to demonstrate caring and to make content relevant. Using the rhetorical and relational goals of instruction theory as the theoretical model, this study tested the potential for the three dimensions of disclosure (i.e., amount, negativity, relevance) to account for variance in instructor rhetorical goals (i.e., relevance) and relational goals (i.e., caring). The results highlight the importance of relevant instructor disclosures to perceiving an instructor as achieving rhetorical and relational goals within the classroom.     

Practicing Engagement

In recent years, the rapid expansion of Web 2.0 tools has opened new possibilities for audience participation in news, while “engagement” has become a media industry buzzword. In this study, we explore approaches to engagement emerging in the field based on in-depth interviews with editors at a range of news outlets from several countries, and we map these approaches onto the literature on participatory journalism and related innovations in journalism practice. Our findings suggest variation in approaches to engagement that can be arrayed along several related dimensions, encompassing how news outlets measure and practice it (e.g. with the use of quantitative audience metrics methods), whether they think about audiences as more passive or more active users, the stages at which they incorporate audience data or input into the news product, and how skeptically or optimistically they view the audience. Overall, while some outlets are experimenting with tools for more substantive audience contributions to news content, we find few outlets approaching engagement as a way to involve users in the creation of news, with most in our sample focusing mostly on engaging users in back-end reaction and response to the outlet’s content. We identify technological, economic, professional, and organizational factors that shape and constrain how news outlets practice “engagement.”     

Digital Democratic Voices: Intersecting Student Research,Twitter, and Presidential Debates

Courses: Mass Communication and Public Opinion, Political Communication

Objectives: Often, there are media events (e.g., local and national elections, the Super Bowl) that match up with what we hope to accomplish in a particular class. The purpose of this semester-length project for students was threefold: (1) to read and comprehend literature related to communication studies, media, and political strategy; (2) to collect and analyze data; and (3) to participate in civic engagement by taking part in Presidential DebateWatch events, both as an audience member and through the use of Twitter.     

An empirical study of the impact of multiple modes of delivery on student learning in a blended course

ABSTRACT

Finding ways to promote students’ online learning performance has always been regarded as a necessity for higher education institutions. In this study, we investigated how certain modes of learning delivery can potentially influence students’ learning. Precisely, the effects of Face-to-Face (F2F), Learning Management System (LMS), and Web-based Learning (WBL) on students’ online learning were examined. A survey questionnaire, distributed to 196 undergraduate students, was used in this study. The use of these modes showed varied effects on the learning outcomes of students. F2F learning mode was found to influence students’ performance in completing online assignments. The result also showed that the use of LMS-based learning mode affects students’ performance in the final exam. These results are believed to provide useful directions for the higher education community to better understand how certain modes of learning delivery can be related to the development of students’ performance in a blended learning environment.