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The history of the academic discipline of communication and the subsequent departments that followed are linked in some form or fashion to the evolution of the introductory communication course. Gi...

Course evaluations can be an effective tool for students to appraise a course and instructor; however, they can also be a communicative space for students to write comments instructors perc...

Instructors often struggle with how to make sense of and handle hurtful student course evaluation comments. These comments can be difficult to resolve when they move from constructive course critic...

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 included both internal and external fears about public speaking, providing meaningful implications for teaching and learning within the introductory communication course.

This study gathered data about communication centers and built on past investigations of how centers function across the United States. Communication center directors or individuals who oversee centers at two- and four-year institutions of higher education (N = 47) were surveyed. Participants responded to questions about center structure and configuration, logistics and operation, directorship, staff and training, and services. The findings highlight current and changing trends of centers. Overall, this study offers a summative discussion of how centers should be re-envisioned to provide broader impacts for institutions of higher education.

Video continues to be used in many basic communication courses as a way for students to self-evaluate speechmaking. In this study, students (N = 71) presented speeches, viewed the video recordings, and produced self-generated feedback. Comparing student's self-estimated grades from the self-evaluation against earned grades resulted in composite scores that were organized in three estimator categorizations: under-, accurate-, or overestimators. The estimators' feedback was analyzed by new software, the Meaning Extraction Helper, to identify specific themes. The common content words that emerged provided themes that were then inductively categorized. Results indicated unique categories/subcategories for each estimator type and minor subcategory similarities across estimators. Findings discuss estimator perceptions influencing student understanding of their speaking skills.