Course Sequencing in the Communication Curriculum: A Case Study

Abstract

This case study of the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland demonstrates the need to consider course sequencing in the communication curriculum. The investigation assessed whether the order in which undergraduates took courses predicted grade performance. Students' (N = 6,166) grade data from earlier courses were used to predict grades in subsequent coursework. Analyses indicated that students who took the introductory survey course before, rather than after, upper-division courses performed better in subsequent courses. The order in which students completed theory and methods courses predicted performance differently for social science and rhetoric sequences. Other results suggest undergraduates have difficulty when taking courses from different intellectual traditions; students who previously completed rhetoric courses performed worse in empirical research methods and public relations courses compared to students who had not yet taken rhetoric classes. This research provides a replicable model for identifying effects of course sequencing in departments of communication, highlights the importance of course sequencing to student learning, and indicates new pedagogical challenges to developing effective communication curricula.

Keywords:

• Course Sequencing
• Undergraduate Curriculum
• Core Courses
• Communication Assessment

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Professors Edward L. Fink, Dale Hample, and Leah Waks, as well as the editor of Communication Education and the reviewers, for their helpful suggestions

Notes

1. Students are required to take a statistics course outside of the department of communication before enrolling in COMM400.

2. Class size was not initially included as a control variable in statistical analyses. Post hoc analyses demonstrated that, while sometimes having a significant effect on the grades students earn—smaller classes generally predicted higher grades—the effect sizes were minimal, and the variables only accounted for a small amount of explained variance (i.e., an average increase in R ² of .02) without affecting the ability of the other variables to predict grade performance. Class size did not affect the ability of earlier course performance to predict later course performance. Thus, the analyses reported in the results exclude class size as a control variable.

3. The current requirements for the undergraduate major in communication were first implemented during the Fall 2000 semester.

4. Only courses taken at the University of Maryland, College Park, were included in this dataset; transfer credits from other universities were not available for analysis. Further, the Department of Communication revised its name in 1998; courses taken before this time were listed under a different abbreviation by the Registrar's office—SPCH instead of COMM—and were also not included in analysis. The percentage of students in this group was probably small given that the data used in this analysis begin two years after the change. The dataset includes current students at UMD, and many have data for the introductory survey course but have not completed other core courses at the time data were analyzed. For these reasons, the sample sizes used in statistical analyses are smaller than the number of students included in the initial sample.

5. The one exception to this pattern is that grades in Rhetorical Theory do not significantly predict grades in Public Relations Theory. This result may simply be due to the test being underpowered because of a small sample size.

6. That success in Introduction to Communication strongly predicted performance in all subsequent courses suggests that more capable students—those who get better grades in the introductory course—do indeed exhibit greater overall academic performance. These results demonstrate how academic aptitude predicts grades in the absence of statistical controls (e.g., overall GPA and SAT score).

7. The exception to this pattern is that number of semesters between Introduction to Communication and Empirical Research Methods positively predicts grades in Empirical Research Methods. However, the effect size is very small, suggesting that unexplained effects of maturation account for only a small proportion of variance in this course.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam S. Richards

Adam S. Richards is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland