Throughout the 2020-2021 academic year, college instructors struggled with how to accommodate the extenuating circumstances confronting students during the pandemic while, at the same time, maintaining course integrity. Instructors made decisions about accepting late assignments, extending deadlines, and relaxing attendance guidelines for students…

Although applied to numerous communication contexts, affordance approaches have yet to receive sustained attention in the instructional literature. The ongoing migration to online pedagogy suggests a need to examine the impact of technological affordances and communication in Learning Management Systems. To that end, an experimental study…

This study sought to gain insight into how faculty in other disciplines perceive communication skills as well as to conduct a needs analysis that can help us to develop resources to support faculty who are integrating communication assignments into their disciplinary courses. Survey data were collected from 232 faculty at three large, public…

Previous studies of grading as instructional feedback reveal contrary patterns of motivation among public speaking students. That is, in some cases students who received lower grades on their initial speech assignments made substantial improvements on their subsequent speeches. In other studies, scholars have reported the exact opposite finding.…

The purpose of this study was to test whether increasing the relevancy of course assignments in a large multisection introductory public-speaking course would lead to improvements in student perceptions of course outcomes. Survey responses from 1,878 students were analyzed to test whether differences exist between students enrolled in classes held…

This study catalogues student (N = 828) self-described fears related to public speaking. Specifically, this investigation adds to the knowledge of public speaking anxiety through an initial inductive analysis of students' fears about public speaking and a second analysis (of different data) to authenticate emergent categories. Resulting categories…

As online courses continue to gain popularity in higher education, researchers need to examine how instructors' communication and behavior impact student experiences in online settings. More specifically, research that re-examines findings from the traditional, face-to-face classroom within the online class is beneficial not only for building…