Another look at student dissent as outcomes of instructor behaviors

The purpose of this study was to better understand instructional dissent behaviors (vengeful, expressive, and rhetorical) as influenced by instructors’ immediacy behaviors and clarity. Given that instructional dissent is a symptom of perceived injustice in the classroom, it was anticipated that information flow, a student’s awareness of the rationale behind an instructor’s pedagogical decisions, would play a key role in dissent. While information flow did mediate the relationship between instructor communicative behaviors and expressive and rhetorical dissent, the effect was small. All hypotheses related to vengeful dissent could not be tested due to extreme kurtosis in the distribution. This dataset is not the first to see extremely low means for vengeful dissent behaviors, and the paper calls for more detailed reporting of descriptive statistics in future dissent research to better understand these occurrences.