Do the Messages Matter? An Investigation of Classroom Messages and College Students’ Personal Theories about Education

Students hold a number of personal theories about education that influence motivation and achievement in the classroom: theories about their own abilities, knowledge, and the learning process. Therefore, college instructors have a great interest in helping to develop adaptive personal theories in their students. The current studies investigated whether specific messages that instructors send in college classroom might serve as a mechanism of personal theory development. Across 2 studies, 17 college instructors and 401 students completed surveys assessing their personal theories about education at the beginning and end of college courses. Students and instructors reported hearing and sending many messages in the classroom, including instructor help messages, conciliatory messages, uncertainty in the field messages, differential ability messages and generalized positive and negative feedback. Between-class and within-class differences in message reports were associated with students’ personal theories at the end of their courses, controlling for initial personal theories. Students’ initial personal theories were also related to the messages students reported hearing. The findings demonstrate the utility of assessing non-content messages in college classrooms as potential mechanisms for changing students’ personal theories in college. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Mix it and fix it: functions of composite olfactory signals in ring-tailed lemurs.

Animals communicating via scent often deposit composite signals that incorporate odorants from multiple sources; however, the function of mixing chemical signals remains understudied. We tested both a 'multiple-messages' and a 'fixative' hypothesis of composite olfactory signalling, which, respectively, posit that mixing scents functions to increase information content or prolong signal longevity. Our subjects-adult, male ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta)-have a complex scent-marking repertoire, involving volatile antebrachial (A) secretions, deposited pure or after being mixed with a squalene-rich paste exuded from brachial (B) glands. Using behavioural bioassays, we examined recipient responses to odorants collected from conspecific strangers. We concurrently presented pure A, pure B and mixed A + B secretions, in fresh or decayed conditions. Lemurs preferentially responded to mixed over pure secretions, their interest increasing and shifting over time, from sniffing and countermarking fresh mixtures, to licking and countermarking decayed mixtures. Substituting synthetic squalene (S)-a well-known fixative-for B secretions did not replicate prior results: B secretions, which contain additional chemicals that probably encode salient information, were preferred over pure S. Whereas support for the 'multiple-messages' hypothesis underscores the unique contribution from each of an animal's various secretions, support for the 'fixative' hypothesis highlights the synergistic benefits of composite signals.

Revising Justice: Punitory Thought and Action in the Work of Atwood, Jordan, and Oates

*Designated as an exemplary master's project for 2015-16*

Full of Hot Air? Three Examinations of Climate Change in the American Political Information Environment

Climate change is thought to be one of the most pressing environmental problems facing humanity. However, due in part to failures in political communication and how the issue has been historically defined in American politics, discussions of climate change remain gridlocked and polarized. In this dissertation, I explore how climate change has been historically constructed as a political issue, how conflicts between climate advocates and skeptics have been communicated, and what effects polarization has had on political communication, particularly on the communication of climate change to skeptical audiences. I use a variety of methodological tools to consider these questions, including evolutionary frame analysis, which uses textual data to show how issues are framed and constructed over time; Kullback-Leibler divergence content analysis, which allows for comparison of advocate and skeptical framing over time; and experimental framing methods to test how audiences react to and process different presentations of climate change. I identify six major portrayals of climate change from 1988 to 2012, but find that no single construction of the issue has dominated the public discourse defining the problem. In addition, the construction of climate change may be associated with changes in public political sentiment, such as greater pessimism about climate action when the electorate becomes more conservative. As the issue of climate change has become more polarized in American politics, one proposed causal pathway for the observed polarization is that advocate and skeptic framing of climate change focuses on different facets of the issue and ignores rival arguments, a practice known as “talking past.” However, I find no evidence of increased talking past in 25 years of popular newsmedia reporting on the issue, suggesting both that talking past has not driven public polarization or that polarization is occurring in venues outside of the mainstream public discourse, such as blogs. To examine how polarization affects political communication on climate change, I test the cognitive processing of a variety of messages and sources that promote action against climate change among Republican individuals. Rather than identifying frames that are powerful enough to overcome polarization, I find that Republicans exhibit telltale signs of motivated skepticism on the issue, that is, they reject framing that runs counter to their party line and political identity. This result suggests that polarization constrains political communication on polarized issues, overshadowing traditional message and source effects of framing and increasing the difficulty communicators experience in reaching skeptical audiences.