Students' preferences for communication styles and their relationship to achievement

Abstract

This research measures the preferences students express for the communicator styles of their instructors as conceptualized by Norton (1978). The most preferred styles were friendly and attentive followed by relaxed, impression leaving, animated, dramatic, open, precise, dominant and contentious. The patterns of those preferences were then examined to determine if they were related to patterns in achievement scores, but the results indicated that the association was a weak one at best. Instead, it was found that other variables such as IQ, demographics and a student's learning style preference were stronger predictors of achievement.