Teacher Student Relationship; Teaching Methods

A study was conducted (1) to investigate factors that influence an instructor's choice of behavior when confronted with incidents of students ' poor communication performance, and (2) to demonstrate how attribution Theory can be used as a vehicle for describing and understanding the causes of instructor reactions or behaviors. The study sought to apply to an educational setting the Green and Mitchell model (which suggests that leaders, given evidence of subordinate performance. infer the causes of the performance prior to determining the appropriate action to take). The method involved distributing a memo among speech communication faculty members at three midwestern universities requesting written examples of poor student communication performance, administering two reliability checks, and using an instrument centering upon six episodes of poor communication performance. The results indicate, first, that i