10: Examining Effective Faculty Practice (original) (raw)

Two Meta-analyses Exploring the Relationship between Teacher Clarity and Student Learning

Communication Education, 2015

This article reports the findings of two meta-analyses that explored the relationship between teacher clarity and student learning. Combined, the results suggest that teacher clarity has a larger effect for student affective learning than for cognitive learning. However, neither the effects for cognitive learning nor affective learning were homogeneous. Heterogeneous effects were observed for several additional subsets of the datasets. The first meta-analysis reviews the findings of 144 reported effects (N = 73,281) examining the relationship between teacher clarity and student learning outcomes. The cumulative evidence indicates that teacher clarity accounts for approximately 13% of the variance in student learning. The second meta-analysis reports a random-effects meta-analysis of 46 studies (N = 13,501). Moderators were examined and revealed that study design (i.e., survey versus experiment) moderated the impact of instructor clarity on affective learning. No significant moderators were found for cognitive learning. The cumulative results confirm that teacher clarity has a moderate effect on student affective and cognitive learning; however, persistent heterogeneity among the samples implies the presence of one or more moderating variables. Theoretical, practical, and methodological implications are discussed. Recommendations are made for future clarity researchers including a shift back to using low-inference behavioral measurements instead of high-inference perceptual measurements.

Communication correlates of teacher clarity in the college classroom

Communication Research Reports, 1997

Teac/rerclarity wasfound to bepositively co"elated with perceived nonverbal immediacy and socio-communicative style of the instructor. It also was found to be associated with enhanced student affect toward the instructor and the course. Students who perceived the verbal and nonverbal communication of their instructors as being clear and understandable also perceived their instructors as being nonverbally immediate, assertive, and responsive.

Review of Effective Teaching in Higher Education: Research and Practice

Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 2017

In the field of education, teacher effectiveness research lingers as a reminder of unfruitful efforts to develop a narrowly empiricist science of teaching. Even as such research shifted to school effectiveness, it could not escape the critiques that revealed work on "effectiveness" as little more than the obvious dressed up in fancy quantifications but with nowhere to go. Indeed, by the 1970s, many of the strongest proponents of teacher effectiveness research openly acknowledged its inadequacies and its lack of educational meaning. Critics noted confusions between correlation and causation, simplistic views about the uni-directionality of instruction, and narrow measures of teaching success, namely student achievement on tests. It is disappointing, then, that the contributors to Effective Teaching in Higher Education: Research and Practice do little to address these concerns; nor, in fact, do they appear aware of the lively scholarship on pedagogy emanating from faculties of education, cultural studies, and women's studies. Rather, they remain vested in the belief that "effective teaching can be studied scientifically, its qualities systematically documented, and its 'secrets' successfully imparted through proper training programs" (p. 4). As a result, there is an oddly dated tone to this volume. Let me hasten to add that I am in complete sympathy with the contributors' views that more attention ought to be given to the teaching dimensions of professorial work. Despite the fact that a number of the contributing authors make completely unsubstantiated claims about what professors think about teaching, a strange approach for those who claim to be "scientific," it is easy enough to acknowledge that university teaching could do with some improvement. And who could seriously reject the technical-rational prescriptions for enhancing the epiphenomena of teaching performance? It just seems like common sense to suggest, as Murray does in his chapter, "Effective Teaching Behaviors in the College Classroom," that enthusiastic, expressive professors who have good rapport with students and explain things clearly, will contribute to student learning. Similarly, while the check list of concrete behaviours that

Conditional processes of effective instructor communication and increases in students' cognitive learning

This study examined two effective teaching behaviors traditionally considered by instructional communication scholars to associate positively with students' academic experiences: instructor clarity and immediacy. Our study situated these teaching behaviors in a conditional process model that integrated two key assumptions about student learning: (a) the process by which student learning occurs is due, in part, to the sustained attention that students give to effective instructors (a mediated test of learning) and (b) some students self-regulate their learning despite the (in)effectiveness of the teaching they receive (a moderated test of learning). Three hundred and sixty-two college students were randomly assigned to one of four lecture conditions that manipulated instructor clarity and nonverbal immediacy in a 2 × 2 factorial experiment and completed post-test assessments including a test of cognitive learning. Results indicated that: (a) clear instruction with or without nonverbal immediacy cues directly increased students' test scores by over one letter grade on average; (b) the added benefit of nonverbal immediacy to clear instruction slightly increased test scores, but only indirectly through students' sustained attention; and (c) removing nonverbal immediacy from clear instruction proved detrimental only for students who were not self-regulated.

Ways of Teaching: Striving to Enhance Student�s Understanding in Classroom Setting

i-Manager's journal on nursing, 2012

Learning is enhanced when instruction is being designed in-relation to students' learning styles. Attention to learning styles and learner's diversity has shown an increase students' motivation towards learning. Effective teaching is defined as maximizing learner educational achievement, and teacher and student subject contentment. The key attributes of effective teaching are teacher's preparation, knowledge on the subject, attitude, enthusiasm, and content clarity. Moreover, applying various theories of learning such as behaviorism, cognitivism and humanism are the effective ways to enhance students' learning journey. Therefore, these effective teaching strategies should be promoted and encouraged in the real world of teaching.