Instructor Responses to Rhetorical Dissent: Student Perceptions of Justice and Classroom Outcomes

Abstract

Instructors do not always meet students' expectations. Instead, they may be perceived as engaging in misbehaviors or unfair teaching practices that ultimately lead to student dissatisfaction. When this happens, students have a variety of options including dissenting rhetorically. Though much is known about why students dissent, in the current study we sought to extend instructional communication research by examining students' perceptions of their instructors' responses to rhetorical dissent to determine how perceptions of fair responses were associated with students' classroom outcomes. Participants were 208 students who reported on an incident involving rhetorical dissent and their perceptions of justice in their instructors' responses. Results indicated that students' perceptions of justice regarding instructors' remedial communication promoted transaction-specific satisfaction and positive long-term classroom outcomes.

Keywords:

• Justice
• Dissent
• Complain
• Learning
• Affect

This project was born from Ms. Holmgren's Master's thesis. Special thanks to Patricia Kearney and Timothy Plax for their valuable contributions on behalf of this manuscript.

This project was born from Ms. Holmgren's Master's thesis. Special thanks to Patricia Kearney and Timothy Plax for their valuable contributions on behalf of this manuscript.

Notes

[1] Because the three dimensions of justice were correlated, we conducted confirmatory factor analyses to determine whether a one-factor model fit the data better than a three-factor model. First, we tested the three-factor model. After allowing two theoretically similar associations to covary (procedural justice items one and two that shared the theme of “timeliness,” and interactional justice items three and four that shared the theme of “student input”), the three-factor model fit the data reasonably well (x²=138.47, df=49, p<.01; NC=2.83; CFI=.99; SRMR=.03; RMSEA=.09). Next, we tested a one-factor model by fixing the correlations between the justice dimensions to 1. Results indicated that the one-factor model did not fit the data (x²=838.49, df=52, p<.01; NC=16.12; CFI=.93; SRMR=.06; RMSEA=.27). Moreover, fit statistics indicated that the three-factor model (AIC = 197.47) was superior to the one-factor model (AIC = 890.49). Based on these results, we concluded that that it was appropriate to consider the three dimensions of justice distinct from one another.