Could the research you read be fundamentally flawed? Could critical defects in methodology slip by you undetected? To become informed consumers of research, students need to thoughtfully evaluate the research they read rather than accept it without question. This second edition of a classic text gives students the tools they need to apply critical…

Statistics courses that focus on data analysis in isolation, discounting the scientific inquiry process, may not motivate students to learn the subject. By involving students in other steps of the inquiry process, such as generating hypotheses and data, students may become more interested and vested in the analysis step. Additionally, such an…

The subject of research methods is often unknown, foreboding, and unappealing to undergraduate communication majors. Thus, in the research methods course, two ways to overcome such issues and achieve learning are by: (1) making the unfamiliar more familiar and accessible; and (2) placing abstract knowledge in its useful real-world context. Making…

A program of experimental research has established a relationship between associative reaction time (RT--the time between the presentation of a verbal unit and the first association produced) and performance in verbal learning. Initial studies established that the RT value of verbal units used as response terms has a significant facilitative…

Interactive decision making (IDM) refers to teachers' selection and rejection of alternative courses of action during instruction. Previous research indicates that teachers report making interactive decisions when their plans are disrupted. A study generated hypotheses about teachers' IDM using the grounded theory approach--an inductive system for…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether more or less comprehension occurred on the part of the human receiver when information was transmitted in a verbalized, compressed, repetitive manner through the auditory channel in the same unit of time necessary for one "normal" transmission. A research hypothesis was developed which…