Abstract
Teaching experts suggest that establishing clear expectations and a supportive environment at the beginning of a college course has a lasting impact on student attitudes. However, minimal empirical evidence exists to support these suggestions. Consequently, we randomly assigned instructors to either begin their course with a reciprocal interview activity aimed at these goals or in their typical fashion. At term's end, students experiencing the activity (n = 187) reported greater clarity regarding their course responsibilities, more support from their instructor, and greater course satisfaction on both official evaluations and experimenter-administered measures, compared to students who had not (n = 190). These results contribute to a converging body of evidence regarding the effectiveness of reciprocal interviews and similar activities generally.
Notes
Although instructors in the no activity condition were not given specific instructions to avoid other introductory activities to avoid alerting suspicion to the study's purpose, there is little reason to believe these instructors engaged in a similar activity on their own. The course supervisor (who is also the third author) reviewed all syllabi to ensure uniformity in content and requirements and found no evidence that any instructor in the no activity condition devoted a significant amount of time to any type of extensive expectation-clarifying activity.
Analyses of these variables using course section as the unit of analysis yielded a very similar pattern of findings with activity sections reporting more satisfaction (M= 2.36, SD = .31 vs. M= 1.96, SD = .61, d= .78), more clarity (M= 1.25, SD = .16 vs. M= 1.03, SD = .13, d= 1.21), and more supportiveness (M= 1.16, SD = .19 vs. M= .88, SD = .24, d= 1.09) than nonactivity sections, F(1, 14) = 2.67, p= .12; F(1, 14) = 9.08,p= .01; and F(1, 14) = 6.45, p= .02, respectively.