The usefulness of the verbal receptivity construct in instructional communication research

Perceptions of verbal receptivity of dyadic partners have recently been incorporated into interpersonal research. Receptivity of a teacher appears likely to be associated with student learning. However, it was suspected that perceptions of teacher responsiveness, a factor found very important in previous research, might overlap with perceptions of receptivity to the point that the latter construct would not be useful for predicting additional variability in student learning.

While both verbal receptivity and responsiveness were found to be significantly correlated with both affective and cognitive learning, the data indicated that measures of verbal receptivity and responsiveness were highly correlated. Analyses of variance found that verbal receptivity contributed significantly to cognitive learning but non‐significantly to affective learning (except affect for instructor) when the effects of responsiveness were accounted for. Receptivity probably would be best considered as a subset of the larger responsiveness construct in future work in the instructional arena.

Key concepts:

• Verbal receptivity
• Responsiveness
• Affective learning
• Cognitive learning