Paul L. Witt, Tina Seidel, Ann-Kathrin Schindler, Mark P. Orbe, Kory Floyd, and Jon A. Hess

29The Future of Communication and Learning Research: Challenges, Opportunities, and Predictions

Abstract: Based on past research and cognizant of present-day findings, each of the contributing authors of this Handbook have made predictions concerning the future of research in the various areas that impinge on communication and learning. To synthesize these broad conclusions, the Editor offers clear and specific research agendas for future scholars in each of four areas: technology, culture, contexts, and methodology. The chapter includes hypotheses and research questions that are yet unexplored, as well as a call for rigorous adherence to the highest standards of scholarly inquiry. The Editor is then joined by a panel of five international scholars who, each in turn, offer their vision for the next generation of communication and learning research. They articulate the challenges faced by future scholars, offer suggestions and guidelines for further inquiry, and provide a number of research questions to guide new investigations of communication and learning in the 21st century.

Keywords: future research, hypotheses, research questions, technology, culture, context

“Though vast, the collective knowledge of instructors, professors, researchers, scholars, and practitioners is still incomplete, and the search continues for greater understanding of learning in response to instructional communication.” With this concluding statement from the introductory chapter of the volume, this final chapter begins. What is the future of instructional communication research? Where is the uncharted territory in the immense conceptual landscape of communication between teachers and learners? What opportunities and challenges lie ahead for researchers and practitioners who seek to maximize the effectiveness of instruction?

The distinguished authors who contributed to this volume addressed these questions in relation to the specific focus of their individual chapters. Taken collectively, their observations appear to coalesce into four overall themes that predict a challenging agenda for future research. In this concluding chapter, I will synthesize their predictions, add some of my own, and report the innovative ideas of an international panel of scholars as they participate in the stimulating activity of vision-casting for the field of instructional communication.

FourOpportunities for Future Research

Technology

No serious consideration of teaching and learning can ignore the impact of communication technologies as they support, transmit, or replace verbal instruction. Some of the research reported in this volume took place in the late 20th century, and those findings represent what some consider “the former paradigm” consisting of face-to-face, verbal instruction from an individual teacher to a group of students. It is important to acknowledge that much teaching and learning still occurs in this environment, even in the developed nations of the world who pride themselves on high-tech educational delivery systems. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a future in which face-to-face instruction is no longer common in the schooling of children, the education of college students, and the training of working adults. However, more and more of those instructional messages are being delivered by mediated connections, and it would take a cognitive leap to assume that the interpersonal and educational effects of instruction are identical whether experienced face-to-face or viewed on a computer screen or smart phone. All the classroom variables that have been identified by instructional communication scholars and thoroughly studied in the traditional classroom setting should be re-examined in connection with new communication technologies. Those variables include not only instructional strategies such as clarity, immediacy, humor, and self-disclosure, but also – and perhaps more important – the cognitive characteristics and learning preferences of contemporary students.

A pronounced generation gap exists today between teachers and learners, especially in terms of their dependency on and comfort with mediated communication. The adoption rate of innovative technologies is so rapid that older teens are sometimes shocked by the technical expertise of their younger siblings, and of course parents and teachers are even more distant from the cutting-edge perspectives of the young. Communication researchers have a responsibility to help educators stay current with rapid social change by providing accurate, reliable, and well-documented research findings about the effectiveness of teaching and learning with instructional technologies. Every hypothesis that has been tested in the classroom should be re-tested through mediated systems currently in use, such as online courses, web components of classroom courses, course-related interaction through social media, and even the use of supplemental video or other digital resources projected during classroom instruction. As noted by Wallace and Goodnight in Chapter 20, some institutional administrators assume that recording instruction, packaging it into an online course, and distributing it to large numbers of students will render the same effects as face-to-face instruction in terms of learning and student satisfaction; but education consists of more than the mere transmission of information. In some important ways, teaching at a distance is not the same as teaching face-to-face, and new instructional strategies call for up-to-date research to assess effectiveness and point to further progress. Instructional communication researchers possess the tools and expertise to investigate every assumption driving policy and practice at every level of education.

As the next generation of scholars takes its place in academia, the tech generation gap may diminish somewhat, but the rapid introduction of new technologies will not decrease, and even the young will have to hurry to keep pace with technological innovations. Future scholars, then, should carefully examine learning, motivation, satisfaction, and other outcomes as they are pursued through mediated instruction of all kinds. Our journals should be filled with reports of comparative assessments between in-class and on-line instruction as they relate to perceived interpersonal connectedness, self-efficacy, motivation to continue, and of course learning in all its manifestations – cognitive, affective, and behavioral. Do students more readily receive critical feedback from an online instructor because they perceive less of a face threat than when face-to-face? Are students more willing to accept uncharacteristically transparent self-disclosures from an online instructor, given the unregulated nature of personal disclosure on the web? Does the use of presentational slides during a classroom lecture increase comprehension or recall of course content? Do students prefer to meet with their academic advisers face-to-face, or would an e-mail exchange be more to their liking? Practically every teacher-student interaction – especially instructional messages – must be re-examined and re-evaluated in view of the mediated connections currently in use. Otherwise, global education may be passively transformed into a sea of servers dispersing rivers of information to consumers who may or may not comprehend, remember, or apply the information they receive.

Culture

The majority of research reported in this volume was conducted among college students in the United States. It was in the universities of the United States that the instructional communication research area was formalized (see Meyers et al.’s history in Chapter 2), so it is not surprising that most of the student populations sampled were U.S. residents, and the learning environment in which they received instruction was the U.S. college classroom. What is surprising – and what constitutes a serious factor that may be considered a flaw – is the ethnocentric, perhaps even myopic perspective of most instructional communication scholars. It would not be inaccurate to say that many of them know very little about communication and learning unless it occurs among predominantly white, middle-class, socially mainstream, U.S. American students and teachers. It is so obvious as to seem trite, to say that cultural norms vary from country to country, region to region, even campus to campus, and that those norms exert a significant influence on what is considered acceptable teacher-student communication in that locale. Therefore, virtually every teacher characteristic and behavior, every student characteristic and learning preference, and every pedagogical method included in this volume should be re-examined in diverse cultural settings where significant variations will almost certainly be observed.

Cultural influence is strongly felt in both the content of instructional messages and in the relationship between teacher and students. Concerning content, for instance, it is well established that college instructors in the United States can effectively illustrate course material through personal self-disclosures (see Cayanus and Martin’s Chapter 10) or the use of humor while teaching (see Booth-Butterfield and Wanzer’s Chapter 9), but how useful are these findings to an Israeli tutor or a Korean instructor? Perhaps self-disclosure and humor have a place in their instructional methods also, but have researchers analyzed the types and effects of disclosure and humor in those local cultures? What is humorous or entertaining in a U.S. classroom may produce outrage in another country, so the generalizability of research findings across cultures is limited at best.

The second dimension of instruction that is dramatically affected by culture is that of the teacher-student relationship. Strongly influenced by local socio-cultural norms, teachers use communication to establish and maintain appropriate relationships with their students – but these prescribed roles differ widely around the world. For example, it would be culturally inappropriate for a Chinese professor to apply the findings of American research concerning instructor immediacy. Achieving interpersonal closeness (immediacy) between the teacher and student may not be viewed as socially appropriate, and even if desired, it would be achieved in different ways in the Chinese culture (see Zhang and Witt’s Chapter 7). Thanks to Zhang’s initial research efforts, the assessment of immediacy in other cultures is advancing, but much work lies ahead.

The teacher-student relationship is also affected – in sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic ways – by the diverse social identities of the instructor and/ or individual students. As with other interpersonal relationships, rapport between teachers and students is developed and maintained within the context of personal characteristics that often include perceived differences in sex, gender, race, ethnicity, social class, sexuality, (dis)ability, and age. In Chapter 14 of this volume, McBride and his co-authors call for greater awareness and greater flexibility when instructors and learners embrace different social identities. Critical scholarship has now paved the way for focused, qualitative examinations of social dynamics in the teaching-learning process, and future scholars can pursue a rich array of research questions concerning how diverse social identities influence student learning, satisfaction, and motivation, as well as the instructor-student relationship.

As researchers take steps to push beyond previously limited perspectives, it would be a naïve and erroneous assumption to think that variables like instructional clarity or classroom participation have not yet captured the interest of researchers outside the United States. On the contrary, European scholars have been examining teacher clarity for years (see, for example, Seidel, Rimele, & Prenzel, 2005), and decades of meaningful findings allow European scholars to draw important conclusions about classroom dialogue (Howe & Abedin, 2013; Mercer & Dawes, 2014). A number of excellent journals actively publish the work of communication and learning scholars in Europe and Australasia, but members of the instructional communication community in the United States are largely unaware of this body of work. Future researchers who wish to extend the cultural boundaries of their research should read widely in journals such as Learning and Instruction and Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, both of which are associated with the European Association of Research on Instruction and Learning, and of course respected outlets like the British Journal of Educational Psychology and the Oxford Review of Education, to name but a few. Future researchers should make every effort to establish ongoing research partnerships with scholars from other continents and cultures. International collaboration has become the norm for commerce, security, and environmental concerns – why not forge similar collaborative efforts among communication scholars around the world?

Contexts and Age Groups

The study of communication across the lifespan is not a recent development, but it has not yet spread to the research area of communication education. The inclusion in this volume of Reed et al.’s Chapter 24, which examines how pre-school children learn to communicate, constitutes a departure from the usual focus of communication scholars. Too many researchers in this field have built entire careers on convenience sampling among the students in their college classrooms. Consequently, communication education in college settings is over-represented in the literature, but teaching pre-school and grade school students to communicate effectively is rarely reported. As for communication and learning among adults, a somewhat larger body of literature assesses current andragogical methods used in work-related communication training, as noted by Beebe and Frei in Chapter 27. However, many of the instructor characteristics and behaviors so well-documented in the communication education literature have yet to be tested among adult learners. Are instructors of adults granted greater latitude when it comes to self-disclosure or the use of humor? Is the teacher-student relationship less important to adult learners whose primary focus is obtaining relevant work-related information? Is instructor credibility – particularly the competence dimension – of greater importance in adult contexts than in the college classroom? Are diverse social identities less effectively accommodated among adults than among younger learners?

Although many instructional messages are delivered in the structured environment of a classroom or online course, some of the most influential teacher-student interactions occur in one-on-one conversations outside of the class setting. There is much to be learned about communication and learning when the instructor fills the role of tutor, coach, adviser, or mentor, and in Chapter 22 Jucks and Brummernhenrich call for more focused research on communication and learning in these instructional contexts. Individualized instruction cannot be examined using the same research methods as classroom instruction, so there is a need for greater methodological diversity as scholars examine students’ receptivity to more personalized instruction, their assessment of the role and influence of their adviser, and how a mentoring relationship is established and maintained. Future scholarship in these areas can inform and equip instructors of children, college students, and working adults as they fulfill their instructional role with individual learners.

Theoretical Development and Rigorous Methodology

As instructional scholars move their research into more diverse contexts, cultures, and age groups, they will need to develop new communication theories to interpret their findings and frame future research programs. It is true that descriptive, one-shot case studies sometimes open instructors’ awareness to dimensions of teaching and learning they had not previously seen, but descriptive studies take on greater significance when they are interpreted within a theoretical framework that expands understanding beyond the individual study alone. Although interpretive and post-positive scholars approach theory differently, both perspectives value the role of theory to inform research, and the role of research to inform theory. In the early days, much instructional communication research was criticized as being variableanalytic rather than theory-based. This perception is less accurate today than before, but scholars should learn from the past and maintain a strong theoretical focus as they forge new areas of instructional communication research.

Along with an emphasis on theory, the next wave of research must be methodologically rigorous if instructional communication is to remain a viable field of inquiry. The standards against which social scientific research is evaluated are everincreasing. It is not unusual for seasoned scholars to look back at their early publications and remark, “This study would not make it into print today.” Statistical analyses have become more sophisticated, research designs more complicated, and publication standards more exacting than before. For communication and learning research to be widely disseminated and achieve its maximum impact on the academy, future scholars must strictly adhere to the most rigorous standards of scholarly inquiry.

It will be necessary for critical scholars, as well as social scientists, to renew their commitment to excellence in methodology if their work is to gain more acceptance and be included in a broader range of publication outlets. Critical scholarship is essential to the growth and development of any academic field, and social scientists must never stop reading the work of their colleagues whose mission is to reveal flaws and promote change, however uncomfortable their conclusions maybe. To gain wider readership in the future, those who write critical studies about communication and learning will need to move beyond the usual focus on racial and sexual issues (not that those problems have been resolved, of course) and pose hard questions about other aspects of the teaching-learning process, such as those that follow.

Teacher preparation

Should doctoral programs do more to prepare first-year instructors for college teaching? Should universities hire adjunct instructors who bring expertise from industry but are not well-trained as teachers? Can the age of professors be seen as a negative factor in the eyes of their students – i.e., too young or too old to be credible? Beyond the college context, many questions have yet to be pursued: Should working adults hold their trainers to high standards of teaching effectiveness, or should they accept more responsibility for self-learning? Do parents know instinctively how to teach their small children to relate to others, even if they had poor role models themselves as children? How do changing social norms affect the expectations of parents and teachers concerning courtesy and appropriateness among children and teens?

The teacher-student relationship

Perhaps social scientists have placed too much emphasis on the relational aspects of teaching and learning. Is it necessary to feel close to your teachers in order to learn from them? Do some instructors have an unhealthy focus on being liked by their students? Is it wise to place graduate students in the role of instructor when they are only a year older than some of their students? Should every college instructor seek to develop mentoring relationships with students? How many students can a professor mentor effectively? What safeguards should be in place to prevent mentoring relationships from going awry? Is it wise for instructors to engage freely in social media with their students? Do coaches overstep their role when they become influential parent figures for their players?

Similar questions should be critically addressed relating to pedagogical methods, curriculum design, web-based instruction, and virtually every other aspect of communication and learning. Even widely-held assumptions should be challenged – e.g., the perception that everyone has a right to pursue a college degree, the necessity of a college education to be successful in today’s society, and the notion that education consists of accumulating credit hours. Critical scholars are the most likely voices to speak out concerning these and a host of other issues.

The Views of Five Visionaries

As the volume editor, I invited five respected scholars from Europe and the United States to offer their observations and critique of communication and learning research, as well as their advice for young scholars who will carry this research into the future. Some of them are published instructional scholars; others work in related areas and provide an external assessment of instructional communication research. We begin with the current editor of Communication Education, the major outlet for this research in the United States.

Jon A. Hess, University of Dayton, USA

Interdisciplinary collaboration and cognitive theory

If the focus of instructional communication is to understand how communication and learning relate to each other – in hopes that we can communicate in ways that lead to better learning outcomes – then we must understand how students learn to determine how instructional communication is part of that process. One of the greatest areas of opportunity is to better link instructional communication and cognitive psychology, so we can more substantively connect messages to learning. Both the disciplines of Communication and Psychology could benefit from research collaboration. For instance, Spiro, Vispoel, Schmitz, Samarapungavan, and Boerger’s (1987) older but still interesting work suggests that creation of ill-structured domains offers learning outcomes superior to well-structured domains. If so, then what types of instructor messages or what qualities of student interaction can create the cognitive flexibility that ill-structured domains afford? We also know that intrinsic motivation leads to better learning than extrinsic motivation or no motivation (Deci & Ryan, 1985), but how can instructors communicate with students to effectively enhance their intrinsic motivation? Psychologists have offered perspective on learning, but they have not as thoroughly explored how instructors can move students toward those cognitive accomplishments. Collaboration between educational psychologists and instructional communication researchers could help do that.

Broader social base

Like other parts of the world, the United States is growing increasingly diverse, and the gap between rich and poor is increasing. As a result, we cannot be satisfied when the bulk of our research is grounded in data and perspectives of the white American middle class. We would benefit from collaboration with colleagues in Sociology, Anthropology, Women’s and Gender Studies, and other fields that offer sophisticated lenses on privilege and a diverse population. Such research can address a range of issues that are crucial to our discipline: How can we enhance learning outcomes and retention of students from underrepresented groups? How do we create learning environments that encourage dialogue on difficult topics including race, gender, and privilege? How can instructors whose identity is stigmatized manage self-disclosure in communication with students? These questions, and many more, need more attention in mainstream instructional communication.

Student participation for optimal learning

The recognition that learning results from active student engagement has turned the tide against perceptions that effective teaching is simply a matter of lecturing effectively. Scholars are well aware of the need for student class discussion among other active approaches for getting students engaged in learning. We also know that leading an effective discussion is not an unskilled or haphazard event. Yet little instructional communication research examines the dynamics and nuances of effectively designing and facilitating a class discussion. More research is needed if instructors are to best utilize this important tool for optimal learning outcomes.

Revised curriculum

There is more global interdependence today than in the past, and scholars know that many of the world’s most pressing problems (e.g., climate change, contagious disease, terrorism) can only be solved through international collaboration. The Communication discipline is positioned to prepare college graduates to take on these challenges, but our current curriculum is not well-suited to producing the needed learning outcomes. Most departments base their curriculum on communication contexts (e.g., interpersonal communication, group decision-making, public speaking, and organizational communication) or topic areas that cover wide ground (e.g., ethics and research methods). These topics are useful, but also needed is the knowledge and skill to address social problems and workplace needs that cut across contexts – such as explaining complex ideas to non-experts, running meetings efficiently, working effectively with an angry customer, working collaboratively with others, and solving relationship problems within a team. Although these learning outcomes may sometimes be addressed in our curriculum, they are rarely a primary focus or identified in a manner that allows students to articulate key principles or practice skills directed specifically at those challenges. We need more research focused on how we can better align today’s Communication curriculum with the needs of employers and contemporary problems in our society and the world.

Measurement of learning

Instructional communication scholars must measure learning in more valid ways. Measures researchers most often use for two major forms of learning we typically study – cognitive and affective – both have problems with validity. Cognitive learning has often been measured by asking students how much they thought they learned or by asking students to report learning indicators. Unfortunately, compelling evidence shows that self-reports measure affect more than cognitive gains. Affective learning poses additional challenges. The measure of affective learning traditionally used in our field measures affect and not learning (see the forum on this topic in the October 2015 issue of Communication Education). For both learning outcomes, researchers need to determine cognitive or affective learning goals, then develop observable indicators of student work that demonstrates the degree to which students made those learning gains.

Questions for future research.

Here are a few research questions future scholars will find valuable to pursue:

Tina Seidel and Ann-Kathrin Schindler, Technical University of Munich, Germany

Multiple research methodologies

From the social scientific perspective, we see the need for more detailed, programmatic research combining the approaches of different disciplines such as Education, Psychology, and Communication. Over time and across multiple levels of analysis, systematic programs of research can generate more complete descriptions of typical communication patterns, frequencies, and distributions that describe and explain the complex process of teaching and learning more completely than stand-alone studies. At the same time, we can learn much from in-depth qualitative approaches that provide rich illustrations of various communication contexts. It is important to acknowledge classrooms as individual settings, and instructional communication as a very individual process depending on the experience and communicating style of the teacher, as well as the experience and learning style of the students. Connecting the strength of both research approaches will be necessary if instructional communication scholars are to understand more fully the complex processes involved in communication and learning. One example of this mixedmethods approach is our current project INTERACTION, in which we focus on students’ engagement in classroom interactions depending on the subject context (language arts and math) and their individual characteristics (such as achievement, interest, and self-concept of ability). By using a mixed-methods approach including observable classroom video data and student questionnaires, the project seeks to gain a deeper understanding of how student characteristics influence teaching-learning processes, and which interactive effects occur with regard to further student learning in those classrooms (Jurik, Häusler, Stubben, & Seidel, 2015).

Professional development programs

There is always the risk that important research findings may never be disseminated to instructors because academics and everyday teachers do not often collaborate. One of our particular interests – and one we hope other researchers will adopt – involves the application of research findings to the important process of training teachers to be effective instructors. For example, in the teacher training project DIALOGUE, teachers learn about activating and scaffolding their students to engage in classroom dialogue (Gröschner, Seidel, Kiemer, & Pehmer, 2014; Kiemer, Gröschner, & Seidel, 2015; Pehmer, Gröschner, & Seidel, 2015a, 2015b). Other development programs such as “Accountable talk” (Michaels & O‘Conner, 2012), “Cam talk” (Higham, Brindley, & van de Pol, 2013), and “PRACTISE” (Berson, Borko, Million, Khachatryan, & Glennon, 2016) apply research findings to help teachers maximize the effectiveness of their instructional communication. Future scholars should seek out opportunities to translate their research findings into practical applications and convey those relevant strategies to instructors who can put them into practice.

Sophisticated data collection and analysis

Adopting up-to-date techniques and technologies has the potential to enhance the validity and the value of instructional communication research. For example, new technologies allow catching classroom situations through a 360-degree perspective, though without a specific, focused research question, an overwhelming amount of information may be gathered. Clear designs and research questions help to gather concrete information that focuses on the topic of interest, such as whole group discussion, small group discussions, or student-to-student interactions. After gathering the data, new ways of analyzing the rich pool of video data are available. For instance, state space grids (Hollenstein, 2013) can visualize communication structures in the classroom for both researchers and practitioners. Matching those data with individual student characteristics can help explain why some students willingly engage in classroom participation and others do not. Serious researchers must work to stay current with statistical analyses and data-gathering techniques and not rely on time-tested methods alone.

Questions for future research

We recommend that future researchers examine questions like the following:

Mark P. Orbe, Western Michigan University, USA

Muted voices in instructional research

Communication scholars, particularly critical researchers of color, have criticized existing research exploring instructional communication in terms of its treatment of issues of race (and to a lesser degree other cultural identity markers). Over the past two decades, Katherine Hendrix and colleagues (e.g., Hendrix, Jackson, & Warren, 2003) have written convincingly on how underrepresented voices have been muted in a body of literature that largely assumes a gender/raceless approach to research (Hendrix & Wilson, 2014). As articulated by Hendrix and Wilson, instructional communication scholarship reflects one singular dominant perspective: that of a social scientific approach to studying teachers/ learners as if the saliency of culture is nonexistent. The body of literature in instructional communication will continue to be limited in its scope, relevancy, effectiveness, and ultimate value unless diverse perspectives are valued. If, in the future, the research area of instructional communication is to reach its full potential to inform and transform the teaching-learning experiences of the 21st century, all voices must be welcome, and all voices must be heard.

Difference matters

Existing research has established that perceptions of instructor credibility, immediacy, self-disclosure, and aggressive communication exist through filters informed by meta-perceptions – often in the form of unconscious bias – related to race/ ethnicity, gender, class, nationality, age, dis/abilities, and the like (Hendrix & Wilson, 2014). In other words, “difference matters” (Allen, 2012) and must be explored in all contexts of instructional communication. Handbooks such as this one play a crucial role in defining what is considered “legitimate” instructional communication and socializing new and emerging scholars in terms of what is deemed as “credible” lines of research. If the saliency of culture continues to be marginalized in communication education research, then such lines of scholarly inquiry will continue to be deemed as less legitimate and credible.

Advice for young scholars

My advice to the next generation of scholars is to build on the literature by exploring the interpersonal↔intercultural dimensions of communication education issues. Specifically, they should recognize, understand, and ultimately negotiate the intercultural dialectics identified by Martin and Nakayama (1999). For instance, they must regard participants as both individuals and members of particular cultural groups whose behaviors are a reflection of their personal/social selves and contextual factors. They must be interested in exploring the similarities and differences in how instructional communication exists in varying relational contexts, especially as they reflect issues of privilege and disadvantage. Finally, they must explore the static, yet dynamic, forms of teaching/ learning with a particular eye on they represent a connection to both historical and future realities.

The other advice I would give to the next generation of scholars is to embrace the diversity that exists conceptually, theoretically, and methodologically. Do not fall into the trap of primarily studying one concept, through one particular theoretical lens, and from within one methodological framework. The field of communication is interdisciplinary in nature, with a fantastic array of discovery-oriented options available. Ultimately, the strength of instructional communication scholarship will be achieved through a synergistic mix of perspectives, voices, and approaches.

Questions for future research

In the spirit of advocating for diverse theoretical frameworks within multifocalrelational scholarship, I offer several thought-provoking research questions related to instructional communication:

Kory Floyd, University of Arizona, USA

Theoretical foundations

As a primarily interpersonal scholar, my perception is that instructional communication research is often atheoretic or based on weak theoretical arguments. For example, the focus on immediacy has created an expectation that students can learn only from instructors they like, which I hold to be a misleading conclusion, even if particular immediacy behaviors have the potential to enhance learning. Anecdotally, I learned a great deal from some teachers I despised, while some teachers I adored taught me very little. Theoretically, even though immediacy and prosocial behavior show correlations with some types of learning, I am not sure there is reason to expect that learning can be enhanced only, or even most effectively, by positive affect. I hope that instructional scholars will question critically their assumptions about the educational value of positive communication.

Cognitive neuroscience

Especially with learning outcomes (as opposed to relational outcomes), the field would benefit from a stronger foundation in cognitive neuroscience.

Instructional scholars should have a good handle on what constitutes learning from a neurological perspective. If the end goal is to help people learn, we should understand as much as possible about what cognitive neuroscientists know about learning and the learning process. My perception is that we rely mostly on retention/repetition as a measure that something has been “learned,” when in fact, learning and remembering may be quite different activities – and cognitive neuroscience may have something useful to say about that.

Instructional messages

Much of the communication that takes place in an educational context is not instructional communication. For example, teachers and students engage in social communication (“So what did you and your family do this weekend?”), school counselors and students engage in empathic communication, and administrators and parents engage in instrumental communication. Nonetheless, scholars tend to consider all communication that occurs in an instructional context as instructional communication, without considering the function of that communication and the fact that much of it is not truly instructional in any meaningful way. Therefore, a wide variety of other theories could be meaningful for understanding educationrelated communication that has functions other than the delivery of instruction about course material. For example, theory and research on empathy, mental health, and developmental psychology would be much more relevant to the communication between a counselor and student than would instructional communication theories.

Interpersonal-instructional overlap

It may seem surprising that I, as an interpersonal scholar, believe we make too much of the intersection between instructional and interpersonal communication. Specifically, I think we over-estimate their overlap. We have come to treat the classroom setting – and the relationship between students and teachers – as inherently interpersonal, but I am not convinced of that assertion. The same has been said about how the field treats the relationship between doctors and patients as an interpersonal context. In both cases (teachers/students and doctors/patients), the communication may be better conceptualized as professional and instrumental than interpersonal. There are specific instrumental goals in both cases (instruction in material; diagnosis and treatment) that do not characterize most truly interpersonal interactions, and so by focusing too much on interpersonal goals and outcomes (such as student/ patient satisfaction and positive affect), we may be distracting ourselves from what really matters in these more instrumental relationships. I do not need to like a teacher to learn from him, nor do I need to like a doctor to be treated successfully by her – but it seems to me that by “interpersonalizing” these relationships, our field supports the assumption that liking/positive affect are necessary in these relationships. Not only do I think that is untrue, but it also distracts us from understanding what truly does matter for learning and for treatment.

Questions for future research

Here are some research questions that future scholars should examine:

Concluding Thought from the Editor

On my worst days, when everything goes wrong and nothing seems worthwhile, I worry that the field of instructional communication may have passed its peak in terms of contribution to the academy, that our methods are repetitious and our constructs over-examined, and consequently our voice is neither heard nor respected by other Communication scholars or anyone outside the discipline. Then the sun comes out – I receive an enthusiastic acceptance for my latest research study, or a graduate student writes about how my work inspired her to become a teacher – and I see nothing but possibilities ahead for this challenging and rewarding research area. What more relevant and significant endeavor could a scholar embrace than to comprehend as fully as possible how a young person’s mind is shaped by the instructional messages of an effective teacher? The mission of instructional communication scholars is so much greater than the mere development of theories and accumulation of findings. We are privileged to spend our professional days searching for keys to profound and mysterious processes that help young people reach their full potential. We are challenged by an endless array of cultures and contexts yet to be examined, and we are just beginning to recognize our vocation to equip teachers everywhere as they carry out their crucial mission – to prepare the next generation of the world’s citizens. I am convinced that, for those who are willing to think in new ways and move in new directions, the future is very bright for research and practice in communication and learning. It is my hope that the contents of this volume will serve the field as both information and inspiration for years to come.

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