A study examined the participation behaviors of undergraduate students. Much of the existing literature has focused on student variables in determining participation in the classroom. Here, the focus was on instructor variables instead. Students completed questionnaires and reported their own perceptions of their participation in class as well as…

The objective of this study was to examine the relationships between interactive television instructors' perceptions of students' nonverbal responsiveness and the influence of these perceptions on distance teaching. The study yielded three general conclusions. First, interactive television instructors' perceptions of students' nonverbal…

Touch is an important and powerful form of communication that is often avoided for fear of negative interpretations. However, touch has also been associated with positive relational and educational outcomes. In this study, descriptions of touch that occurred between teachers and undergraduate students were elicited from students and then sorted…

Touch is an important and powerful form of communication that is often avoided for fear of negative interpretations. However touch has also been associated with positive relational and educational outcomes. In this study, descriptions of touch, elicited from students, that occurred between teachers and students were sorted using S.E. Jones' (1994)…

Conducts an experiment on teacher expectancy effects to investigate the simultaneous effects of student gender, communication channel, and type of material taught (vocabulary and reasoning). Finds that the magnitude of teacher expectation effects was greater when students had access to visual cues, especially when the students were female. (MS)

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…

Presumably, during persuasion, a violation of a subject's expected distance would act as a distraction, increase the likelihood of message acceptance, create fewer counterarguments, and shift the listener's focus from message content to speaker characteristics. Forty-nine undergraduate speech students participated in a study at a major…

For years, instructional communication literature has been telling teachers to be verbally and nonverbally immediate and to achieve clarity in order to enhance student motivation and learning. Unfortunately, the primary source of these recommended instructor behaviors has been the traditional college undergraduate student between the ages of 18…

A study examined which factors of telecommunication system design and instructor style had the greatest impact on student perceptions of learning and satisfaction with televised instruction. Surveys were completed by 164 adult learners evaluating over 20 courses taken via two-way, multi-camera, telecommunications systems. Results showed that…

A study investigated the listening experiences of American university students who interviewed people from other cultures as part of a class project. A total of 103 individuals from African, Asian, European, Latin American, and Middle Eastern cultures were interviewed. Each of the American interviewers described his/her perceptions of five…

Thematic interviews of teachers and students in web-based courses described social interaction in terms of stage analysis and dramaturgy: role, stage, audience, script, and episode. Lack of nonverbal communication affects these elements. Even in the web medium, participants tend to continue roles from the face-to-face classroom. (Contains 20…

A study examined instructional videoconferencing to determine the effects of manipulating the perceived proxemic distance between students and an on-screen instructor on students' recall and attitude response ratings. Subjects, 43 undergraduate students from a multi-section introductory public speaking course at a large midwestern university, were…

Finds that students enrolled in conventional classrooms and distributed-learning classrooms (in which students primarily interact with the instructor and other students through computer-mediated communication) did not perceive a significant difference in instructor verbal immediacy, but they did perceive a significant difference in instructor…

Finds significant relationships between levels of teaching assistant dress and student cognitive learning, student affective learning, and ratings of instruction. Finds significant negative relationship between casual instructor attire and student likelihood of misbehavior, with misbehaviors less likely for teaching assistants with high…

Tested a model of secondary and college students' affective learning (attitudes toward course, subject, teachers) as a function of behavior alternation techniques (BATs) and teacher nonverbal immediacy (concern for students). Found a positive relationship among teachers' use of BATs, immediacy, and students' affective learning. (PD)