Many of today’s college students have experienced disruptions to their education due to the COVID-19 pandemic, negatively affecting their personal well-being as well as their academic preparation. Encouraging students to embrace effective and meaningful study habits can be one way to improve their college readiness and confidence in learning.
One professor at Western Iowa Tech Community College designed a mandatory post-test reflection and correction for students and saw dramatic improvement in their performance on the second exam. The assignment encourages students to strengthen their study habits and hold themselves accountable for making meaningful changes.
What’s the research: Students say their biggest challenges when studying are time management (47 percent) and distractions from technology or other people (both 38 percent), as well as a lack of sufficient time (34 percent), according to a 2024 survey from Kahoot. Forty-one percent of respondents indicated they experience anxiety while studying, compared to 34 percent who said they feel confident.
Test corrections, also called exam wrappers by teaching and learning centers, are activities delivered before or after an assessment to help students consider how they study and ways they could improve their practices before the next exam.
Past research on exam wrappers has found that implementing the strategy can improve course and exam grades, as well as students’ level of metacognition and changes to study habits.
For years, Frank O’Neill, a sports medicine instructor at Western Iowa Tech, has offered students the opportunity to complete an optional correction worksheet after each exam. Typically, the students who take him up on the opportunity are the ones already excelling in the course, he said—not those who could benefit from additional support.
“My primary goal is to turn a D student into a C student,” O’Neill said.
This summer, O’Neill decided to run an experiment and see if making the test analysis and correction worksheet mandatory would have any impact on students’ grades.
The assignment: After students take an exam, O’Neill’s assignment asks them a series of reflection questions on their study habits as well as a post-test commitment to improving their test-taking abilities.
Some of the questions are designed to help O’Neill understand which study strategies students employ and how they correlate to their grades.
For example, he’s learned that a student who’s less confident entering into the assessment more often receives a higher score than their confident peers, which O’Neill believes is because students who have studied longer have spent more time wrestling with the material and consider it to be difficult, compared to their peers who skim notes and think they’ve learned content.
Other questions prompt students to consider their test-taking abilities and the errors they make frequently. Sometimes students indicate that they got a question wrong because they changed their answer from the correct response to an incorrect one, O’Neill said, which allows him to encourage more confident responses.
“Your brain is smart; your gut is smarter than your brain,” O’Neill said. “You gotta go with that gut.”
Students can also provide feedback to the professor on how to improve the course. Sometimes O’Neill gains insights from test performance and frequently missed questions to understand how to make content clearer in the future.
The assignment requires students to correct every incorrect response on the test, which O’Neill says serves as a study technique as well, because exams are cumulative, so students will need to know the right answer later. It also fosters a growth mindset among learners, helping them reframe their learning and consider how to fail forward and see assessment as progress toward their goals, O’Neill said.
The impact: O’Neill is teaching two sections of microbiology this summer with 20 students enrolled in each section.
After the first exam, O’Neill assigned all students in one section to complete the exam wrapper, which would add five points to their grade. The other section could complete the optional wrapper but without points attached.
By the second test, the difference between classes was clear; the optional correction section showed little to no difference in grades between exams one and two. In the mandatory correction section, the average exam grade rose nine percentage points.
Since he first offered the assignment, O’Neill hasn’t received any negative feedback from students about having to complete the exam wrapper, which he attributes in part to his commitment to avoid giving students “busywork,” instead explaining the purpose behind each assignment. He’s also seen self-reported levels of test anxiety decrease over the course of the semester among students who use the wrapper and fewer students failing or dropping the class, signaling the personal benefits of the worksheet.
O’Neill now plans to assign the post-test reflection to all the courses he’s teaching this fall, for about 200 students in total. He’s also exploring opportunities to digitize at least portions of the assignment in the college’s learning management system, Canvas.
Do you have an academic intervention that might help others improve student success? Tell us about it.
A new report from Brandeis University researchers concluded that 7 percent of non-Jewish faculty polled during the spring semester at “very high research activity” universities showed “a pattern of explicitly hostile views toward Jews as a people.”
The “Ideology in the Classroom” report, released last week, says an additional 3 percent of non-Jewish faculty “had a pattern of views about Israel that are generally described as antisemitic” by Jewish organizations and Jewish students. And while 11 percent of non-Jewish faculty who self-identified as extremely liberal were “hostile to Israel”—a view “virtually non-existent among all other political identities, including other liberals”—the faculty “with more conservative political views, including those who were the most critical of DEI, were the most likely to be hostile to Jews.”
Over all, though, the report says 90 percent of non-Jewish faculty were hostile to neither Jews nor Israel.
“The results confirm our earlier research findings that Jewish students are more likely to experience hostility from their peers than from faculty,” the authors wrote. They added that “government efforts to punish universities as a whole for their lack of viewpoint diversity and failure to address antisemitism are not well targeted to address these challenges. For example, STEM faculty, who are less likely to teach about contentious political issues, are the most likely to be profoundly harmed by the government’s cancellation of federal research grants.”
Leonard Saxe, one of the authors and the Klutznick Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies and Social Policy at Brandeis, told Inside Higher Ed that faculty “don’t appear to express any interest in imposing their own political or ideological views on students.” Saxe said, “Faculty need to be seen as allies” in resolving the problems underlying the conflict between the government and universities regarding antisemitism and diversity more broadly.
“They want the same thing,” Saxe said. “They want to teach students how to understand diverse perspectives, multiple perspectives. They don’t want to make every single issue political.”
Graham Wright, another author and an associate research scientist at Brandeis’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, said that to the extent antisemitism is an issue on some campuses, it’s “not necessarily due to the actions of large numbers of faculty, but a smaller group.”
The report found that almost half of Jewish faculty were somewhat or very much concerned about antisemitism on their campuses, and they were “more concerned about antisemitism emanating from the political right than the political left.” This “can be attributed in part to the political makeup of Jewish faculty,” the authors wrote, noting that more than 80 percent of Jewish faculty identified as liberal and about a quarter as extremely liberal.
Using a statistical model, the researchers also sought to predict hostility from non-Jewish faculty based on their holding certain beliefs. They concluded that “faculty who more strongly agreed that Israel was an apartheid state” were likelier to be hostile to both Israel and Jews. And they found no statistically significant difference between academic areas in levels of faculty hostility after controlling for other factors.
The study grouped faculty into these categories of “hostile to Jews,” “hostile to Israel” or hostile to neither based on their pattern of agreeing or disagreeing with seven statements.
The statements were:
“Jews in America have too much power,”
“Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind,”
“Jewish people talk about the Holocaust just to further their political agenda,”
“Jews should be held accountable for Israel’s actions,”
“Israel does not have the right to exist,”
“I wouldn’t want to collaborate with a scholar who supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state,” and
“All Israeli civilians should be considered legitimate targets for Hamas.”
The report says “virtually no non-Jewish faculty expressed agreement” with that last claim.
The researchers also wrote that “more than three-quarters of the faculty in our sample reported that, over the past academic year, the Israel-Palestine conflict never came up in class discussions, and less than 10 percent reported actively teaching about it.” Saxe said there’s not much evidence that a faculty member’s negative attitudes toward a group “seep into” their classroom.
The researchers surveyed 2,335 faculty across 146 R-1 Carnegie classification universities from Feb. 3 to May 5. About 11 percent of the sample was Jewish. The online survey also polled faculty on other current political issues, such as immigration.
“More than two-thirds of faculty identified as liberal, while one-third identified as moderate or conservative,” the report says, but “there was overwhelming agreement among faculty that climate change is a crisis requiring immediate action and that President Trump is a threat to democracy.”
The report also says that “half of liberal faculty members and 70 percent of extremely liberal faculty members expressed serious concerns about being targeted by the federal government for their political views.”
But Saxe said that “as a faculty member on campuses most of my life, I believe we’re not going to address the current issues unless faculty themselves get more engaged—and that it’s recognized by policymakers that we need faculty if we’re going to solve these issues.”
Defending academic freedom is an all-hands-on-deck emergency. From the current administration’s scrutiny of (and executive orders related to) higher education, to state legislative overreach and on-campus bad actors, threats to academic freedom are myriad and dire.
As leader of a program focused on free expression and academic freedom, I see faculty and campus leaders who are flummoxed about how to respond: Where to begin? What can be done to make a difference in defending academic freedom?
I have an answer, at least if you’re graduate faculty, a dean or director of graduate studies, or a provost: Make a plan to prepare graduate students—tomorrow’s professors—to defend academic freedom.
Graduate students often feel too pressed to focus on anything other than their coursework or dissertation and so are unlikely to study academic freedom on their own, even if they know where to find solid information. It is incumbent on faculty to put academic freedom in front of graduate students as a serious and approachable topic. If their professors and directors of graduate study do not teach them about academic freedom, they will be ill prepared to confront academic freedom issues when they arise, as they surely will, especially in today’s climate.
An example: When I met with advanced graduate students at an R-1 university, one student recounted an experience as a junior team member reviewing submissions for a journal. He reported that another team member argued for rejecting a manuscript because its findings could be used to advance a public policy position favored by some politicians that this colleague opposed. The student was rightly troubled about political factors being weighed along with methodology and scholarship but reported he didn’t have the knowledge or confidence to respond effectively. Bottom line: His graduate school preparation had incompletely prepared him to understand and act on academic freedom principles.
Here is a summer action plan for graduate faculty, deans and provosts to ensure we don’t leave the next generation of scholars uncertain about academic freedom principles and how they apply in teaching, scholarship and extracurricular settings.
Add an academic freedom session to orientation. Orientation for matriculating graduate students is a can’t-miss chance to begin education about academic freedom.
Patrick Kain, associate professor of philosophy at Purdue University, provides a primer on graduate students’ academic freedom rights and responsibilities during his department’s graduate student orientation. His session covers the First Amendment, state law and campus policies. He provides written guidance about what to do, especially in their roles as teaching assistants (“pay attention to the effects of your expression on others”); what not to do (“don’t compel speech”); and what they should expect (“students’ experiences and sensitivity to others’ expression will vary”).
Reflecting on his experiences leading these orientation sessions, Kain said, “Graduate students, especially those joining us from quite different cultures and institutions, really appreciate a clear explanation of the ground rules of academic freedom and free expression on campus.” He added, “It puts them at ease to be able to imagine how they can pursue their own work with integrity in these trying times, and what they can expect from others when disagreements arise.”
However, orientation cannot be a “one and done” for a topic as complex as academic freedom. Additional steps to take this summer include:
Revisit the professional development seminar. Most graduate students take a professional development seminar before preliminary exams. When I took that seminar three decades ago, academic freedom wasn’t a topic—and my inquiries suggest academic freedom hasn’t been added to many professional development seminars since. This must change. In addition to sessions on writing a publishable article and giving a job talk, include sessions on the history and norms of academic freedom and free inquiry. Assign foundational academic freedom documents, such as the American Association of University Professors’ 1940 Statement on the Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure and the 1967 Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students, alongside a text offering an overview of academic freedom principles, such as Henry Reichman’s Understanding Academic Freedom (Johns Hopkins Press, 2025).
Schedule an academic freedom workshop. Graduate students at all stages—and your faculty colleagues, too!—can benefit from stand-aloneworkshops. Include tabletop exercises that allow students to appreciate nuances of academic freedom principles. For example, tabletop exercises let students test possible responses to a peer who is putting a thumb on the scale against publishing a manuscript submission on nonacademic grounds, to department colleagues who are exerting pressure on them to sign a joint statement with which they disagree or to administrators bowing inappropriately to donor wishes or political pressures. The reports of the Council of Independent Colleges’ Academic Leaders Task Force on Campus Free Expression include ready-for-use tabletop exercises.
Bolster classroom training for teaching assistants. Professors with teaching assistants can provide an insider’s look into their process for designing a course and planning class meetings, with a focus on how they build trust and incorporate divergent viewpoints, and their approach to teaching potentially controversial topics. In weekly TA meetings, professors and TAs can debrief about what worked to foster robust discussion and what didn’t. Centers for teaching and learning can equip graduate students with strategies that build their confidence for leading discussions, including strategies to uphold free expression and inclusive values when a student speaks in ways that others think is objectionable or violates inclusion norms. The University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching offers programs tailored to graduate students and postdocs, including a teaching orientation program.
Look for opportunities to provide mentorship. An academic career isn’t only about teaching and scholarship but also entails serving on department and university committees, providing—and being subject to—peer review, and planning conferences. Academic freedom questions come up with regularity during these activities. Graduate faculty serve asmentors and should be alert to opportunities to discuss these questions. One idea: Take a “ripped from the headlines” controversy about journal retractions, viral faculty social media posts or how universities are responding to Trump administration pressures and plan a brown-bag lunch discussion with graduate students.
Take the next step in rethinking graduate student preparation. While the steps above can be taken this summer, with a longer planning horizon, it is possible to rethink graduate preparation for a changed higher education landscape. Morgan State University, a public HBCU in Maryland, offers Morgan’s Structured Teaching Assistant Program (MSTAP), an award-winning course series to prepare graduate students as teachers. Mark Garrison, who as dean of the School of Graduate Studies led the development of MSTAP, explained, “In our required coursework for teaching assistants, we are intensely focused on establishing ground rules for TAs” around how to guide “student engagement that is accepting and encouraging without the intrusion of the TA’s personal views.”
Garrison added, “This makes free expression a component of instruction that must be cherished and nourished. We cannot assume that the novice instructor will come to this view naturally, and we do our best to embrace a reflective teaching model.”
Academic freedom is under threat. As Mary Clark, provost and executive vice chancellor at the University of Denver, observed, “Graduate students are developing identities as scholars, learning what academic freedom means in their research and in the classroom—and how their scholarly identity intersects with their extracurricular speech as citizens and community members. It is critical that we support them in developing these understandings.” This summer is the time to plan to do exactly that.
Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill is senior director of the Civic Learning and Free Expression Projects at the Council of Independent Colleges.
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Lily Tegner didn’t know what she wanted to do when she graduated from Oregon State University with a chemical engineering degree five years ago. She entered the workforce at a point when unemployment briefly skyrocketed and companies were freezing hiring because of the Covid pandemic. “I didn’t have a very clear direction as far as where I was going in life,” she said.
Like hundreds of thousands of other young adults, Tegner kick-started her career through AmeriCorps, a federal agency that sends its members to communities across the country to tutor students, help after disasters strike and restore wildlife habitats, among other activities. She took a position at the Alaska Afterschool Network, where her job was to help find ways to expand science, technology, engineering and math access in its programs. Four years later, she’s still there — now, as a full-time employee managing the nonprofit’s AmeriCorps program.
“This state became my home,” Tegner said, adding that her year in AmeriCorps “completely changed the trajectory of my career.”
An AmeriCorps member poses with a student in one of the Alaska Afterschool Network’s funded programs. The organization lost its AmeriCorps funding last spring. Credit: Courtesy of Alaska Afterschool Network
This spring, Alaska Afterschool Network was one of hundreds of organizations abruptly notified that its AmeriCorps funding had been terminated. Federal funding cuts forced the nonprofit to eliminate three full-time positions and cancel 19 internships scheduled for this summer. Tegner’s job is also at risk, though the organization is trying to find a way to keep her on.
In late April, the Trump administration slashed 41 percent of AmeriCorps’ funding, cutting about $400 million in grants and letting go of more than 32,000 members serving in hundreds of programs across the United States. In June and also this month, judges ordered the government to restore some funding, but the ruling does not reinstate all the money that was taken away. Shrinking AmeriCorps is among the many steps the Trump administration has taken to curb what he has called “waste, fraud and abuse” of federal funds. More action is expected in the months ahead.
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Over the years, the program former President Bill Clinton created has deployed more than a million people.On top of gutting AmeriCorps, the cuts have diminished the reach of an agency that has been a critical path to a career for recent high school and college graduates at a time when entry-level jobs can be difficult to find.
AmeriCorps was created more than three decades ago to oversee expanded federal volunteer programs, incorporating existing projects including Volunteers in Service to America and the National Civilian Community Corps. Its members take on community service positions across the country that can last for up to two years. They receive a small living stipend, and full-time members are eligible for health insurance. At the end of their terms, members are awarded a grant that can be used to pay college tuition or student loans.
“AmeriCorps dollars have a powerful ripple effect, for both the AmeriCorps members and the students that they serve,” said Leslie Cornfeld, founder and CEO of the National Education Equity Lab, a nonprofit that brings college courses to high-poverty schools. “In many instances, it helps them define their careers.”
About half of the AmeriCorps funding for the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development was cut this spring. Credit: Courtesy of PHENND
Federal surveys of AmeriCorps members from 2019, 2021 and 2023 show that 90 percent of members joined the national program in part to gain skills that would help them in school and work, and well over 80 percent said their experience in AmeriCorps helped further their “professional goals and endeavors.”
The Trump administration cited fraud as part of its reason for nearly halving the AmeriCorps budget. Audits of the agency have raised questions about its financial management.
Peter Fleckenstein, 23, joined Aspire Afterschool in Arlington, Virginia, through AmeriCorps last year after graduating from the University of Delaware with a degree in psychology. He saw AmeriCorps as a way to build out his resume; even the entry-level positions he encountered during his job search required experience in the field.
In his position at the after-school program, Fleckenstein leads daily activities for a group of about two dozen fourth grade students. The experience has helped him crystallize his career aspirations: Before AmeriCorps, he was considering clinical social work or teaching. Now, he wants to become a counselor.
“Working with the kids here is a lot of behavior management: problem solving, helping them regulate themselves,” Fleckenstein said. “Doing one-on-one work with them, building habits and routines with them — that is something that I could focus on more if I was in a counseling job.”
Fleckenstein’s position was cut in April before he could complete his one-year term set to end in August, but Aspire Afterschool was able to raise money through donations to hire him and some of the nonprofit’s other AmeriCorps members part-time to finish out their grant year.
The Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development lost half of its AmeriCorps funding this past spring when the federal agency was slashed. Credit: Courtesy of PHENND
While some members have joined Americorps after graduating, student Deja Johnson, 24, joined as a way to help pay for college. Her term at The Scholarship Academy — a nonprofit in Atlanta helping low-income high school students navigate financial aid applications — was supposed to end with a $7,400 education grant. Because the terms were cut short, members have been told they’ll get only a prorated portion of the money.
“It’s a little bit of a shame,” said Johnson, who is using the education grant to pursue a bachelor’s degree in nonprofit leadership.
“That’s what a lot of us look forward to with this work that we’re doing, because we know how much of a sacrifice it can be at times. It’s that ‘pouring into our community’ — and that’s how our community pours into us,” Johnson said.
The AmeriCorps termination letters told grantees that their programs no longer met agency priorities, but the nonprofits were not told what those priorities are. Programs with different missions, in both Democratic- and Republican-led communities, were cut.
Sira Coulibaly, a member with the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development’s Next Steps AmeriCorps program, packs bags of food for the Metropolitan Area Neighborhood Nutrition Alliance. Credit: Courtesy of PHENND
The Hindman Settlement School, a nonprofit in rural Kentucky, was one victim of the cuts. The organization receives about $1 million a year from AmeriCorps for its program tutoring students with math and reading learning disabilities in more than two dozen schools. Losing that funding means drastically scaling back services, said Josh Mullins, senior director of operations at the Hindman Settlement School. He said he does not know why Hindman’s grants were terminated: The nonprofit regularly passes its audits, and its last annual report showed an average gain of seven months in reading levels among students in its dyslexia intervention program.
A statement published in January on an AmeriCorps webpage says the agency is in the process of “conducting a full review” to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion in federal programs. But Mullins and other AmeriCorps grantees said diversity, equity and inclusion efforts were not listed anywhere as part of their operations.
“That’s what’s devastating,” Mullins said. “It was completely out of our control. There was nothing you could do.”
The administration also gutted 85 percent of the agency’s federal staff, which has caused problems even for programs that are still receiving AmeriCorps funding.
The federal government terminated about half of the AmeriCorps grants for the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development. The group uses the funding to place members in local nonprofits and to help develop community partnerships in high-poverty schools. Director Hillary Kane said she’s been experiencing delays from the national AmeriCorps office in getting members approved for the programs that are still operating.
“We need the humans in D.C. to do the stuff that they do, so we can do the stuff that we do,” Kane said. “The person we communicate with isn’t there.”
About half of the AmeriCorps funding for the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development was cut this spring. Credit: Courtesy of PHENND
On June 5, a federal judge granted a temporary injunction ordering the Trump administration to restore AmeriCorps funding in states that had sued over the budget cuts. The lawsuit, which was filed by two dozen Democratic-led states in May, challenges the administration’s authority to cancel the funding without Congressional approval. But the judge’s injunction does not require the Trump administration to reinstate AmeriCorps’ federal employees, and funding is not being restored to programs in states that did not sign on to the lawsuit, including Alaska, home of the Alaska Afterschool Network, or Virginia, where Aspire Afterschool is based.
The Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky was one organization whose funding was restored this summer because of the lawsuit. Mullins said he’s hopeful the nonprofit will continue to receive AmeriCorps funding for the upcoming grant cycle in the fall.
For Kane, the injunction does not undo the chaos caused by the abrupt cancellation of half of her Philadelphia organization’s funding. Many terminated members that were with Kane’s organization have already moved on.
Programs whose grants were cut can apply again in the next grant cycle, but the president’s 2026 budget calls for shutting down AmeriCorps entirely.
While the debate in Washington rages, current and former volunteers mourn the potential loss of a program they said gave their lives meaning and led to employment. The avenue AmeriCorps provided for Tegner to start a career at the Alaska Afterschool Network gave her purpose in life, she said. She’s worried if the program ends, there won’t be another pathway on the same scale for young idealists who aren’t sure what they want to do with their lives.
“It helps young people of all ages grow and try new things,” Tegner said. “That’s very much what it was for me.”
Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at [email protected].
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Communication is hard. Even in the best of circumstances, every interaction carries not just the message we intend to send but also our own assumptions, our students’ assumptions, and the ever-growing complexity of language and tone, not to mention the medium itself.
This complexity only multiplies in today’s higher ed environment, where faculty and staff are expected to reach students across multiple platforms — LMS announcements, emails, texts, apps — with messages that range from compassionate to corrective. Meanwhile, the rise of EdTech solutions promising “more reach” has, ironically, made it harder to ensure our messages are received in the way we intended. After all, reach does not equal resonance.
So how can we cut through the noise and actually connect with students?
Communication theory may sound abstract, but it offers a powerful lens for improving how we show up in these interactions. Becoming familiar with two frameworks in particular — Expectancy Violations Theory and Family Communication Patterns Theory — can help us better understand both ourselves and the diverse students we serve.
Want to Know Why Some Student Emails Irritate You and Others Inspire You?
Expectancy Violations Theory (EVT) can help answer that question (Burgoon 1978). EVT helps explain why we react so differently to similar messages depending on who’s delivering them and how.
Very basically, EVT says we form expectations for how interactions will unfold. When those expectations are violated, we automatically shift attention to the violation and to the person who caused it. But we don’t all interpret those violations the same way. Whether we view them as pleasant surprises or annoying disruptions depends on two factors: (1) violation valence, or how positive or negative we feel about the behavior itself, and (2) communicator reward valence, or how much we value the person who violated our expectation.
In other words, if a student I perceive as motivated and respectful asks for an extension, I might feel proud they trusted me enough to ask. But if the same request comes from someone I’ve perceived (rightly or wrongly) as disengaged, I may feel frustrated even if the circumstances are the same.
Reflecting on EVT can help us surface our biases, hold ourselves accountable to equitable treatment, and better understand our own reactions. If you’ve ever wondered why you’ll go above and beyond for one student but feel resistant to another’s similar request, EVT might be a good place to start.
Want to Know Why Some Students Embrace Your Syllabus and Others Push Back?
Family Communication Patterns Theory (FCP) invites us to consider how students’ early communication environments shape how they relate to authority, rules, and classroom norms (Fitzpatrick and Ritchie 1994).
FCP theory identifies four types of family communication climates based on two key orientations: (1) conformity orientation, which emphasizes obedience, family harmony, and deference to authority, and (2) conversation orientation, which emphasizes open discussion, questioning, and individual voice.
Students from “protective” families (high conformity, low conversation) may be less likely to challenge your authority or seek clarification, while those from “pluralistic” families (low conformity, high conversation) may expect more dialogue, debate, and negotiation. Neither is better, but each brings different expectations to the classroom.
This is especially relevant when teaching first-generation college students, as so many of us do these days. These students often navigate new cultural territory not just academically but communicatively. If they come from family environments where questioning authority wasn’t encouraged, they may hesitate to speak up even when confused or struggling. On the other hand, some may challenge norms precisely because they’re breaking with family tradition.
FCP theory doesn’t give us a script, but it does offer a compass. Understanding that students come with different “communication upbringings” can help us meet them where they are, rather than assuming one-size-fits-all policies or approaches will be received as intended.
Five Communication Theory-Informed Tips for Faculty
Understanding communication theory is helpful but applying it is what truly makes a difference in the classroom. If EVT helps us become more aware of how we perceive student behavior, and FCP Theory helps us see the diverse assumptions students bring with them, what can we do differently?
Here are five practical ways to use these insights to communicate more effectively with your students, all the time but also especially when the message really matters:
Notice your gut reactions — then ask why. If a student’s email rubs you the wrong way, pause and reflect. Are you reacting to the content, or to a violated expectation? EVT reminds us that our perceptions are shaped by both the message and the messenger. Naming your bias is the first step toward equity.
Don’t assume your clarity = their clarity. FCP theory suggests students arrive with different assumptions about how authority and conversation work. A policy you think is obvious may feel rigid to one student and open-ended to another. With this in mind, make space to clarify expectations, especially early in the term.
Reaffirm your approachability, even after pushback. When students challenge you, it may not be intended as disrespect. Rather, it might reflect a high conversation orientation. Keep the door open. A brief, calm response — for instance, “That’s a fair question — let’s talk through it” — can defuse tension and build trust.
Explain the “why” and the “what.” Students are more likely to comply with classroom norms when they understand the thinking behind them. Instead of “No late work,” try: “I don’t accept late work because feedback loops are tight in this class. I want you to get input quickly so you can improve in the next assignment.”
Choose connection over correction. Digital platforms can depersonalize your messages and make tone hard to read. When addressing an issue, lead with empathy before jumping to policy. A stern reminder might shut doors, while a check-in — think: “Hey, I noticed this assignment didn’t come through — everything okay?” — opens them up.
Of course, the goal isn’t to categorize our students, but to better understand them. Communication theory can illuminate patterns, but it can’t predict behavior. Each student, like each of us, is shaped by their own myriad of life experiences.
Still, theory offers a starting point. It helps us move from frustration (“Why don’t students read instructions?”) to curiosity (“What might be getting in the way of this message landing?”). And it reminds us that in a world of increasing technological mediation, the most important messages we send to students are often the most human: I see you. I hear you. I want you to succeed.
When we approach our communication with that intention, we’re more likely to teach and reach our students.
Laura Nicole Miller, DET, is an assistant professor in the Grenon School of Business at Assumption University, where she teaches organizational communication, marketing, and management. A first-generation college graduate and former EdTech executive, she studies how communication practices shape equity, trust, and student success in high-stakes environments.
References
Burgoon, Judee K. “A communication model of personal space violations: Explication and an initial test.” Human communication research 4, no. 2 (1978): 129-142. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1978.tb00603.x
Fitzpatrick, Mary Anne, and L. David Ritchie. “Communication schemata within the family: Multiple perspectives on family interaction.” Human Communication Research 20, no. 3 (1994): 275-301. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1994.tb00324.x
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Sarah Henderson was demoted to the backbench after the Coalition lost the May 3 election. Picture: Jane Dempster
Former education opposition spokeswoman Sarah Henderson has broken rank with her party after she pushed for a flat indexation cap on Labor’s student debt-slashing Bill.
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