Students' Perceived Understanding: An Alternative Measure and its Associations with Perceived Teacher Confirmation, Verbal Aggressiveness, and Credibility

Given recent questions regarding the construct validity of Cahn and Shulman's Feelings of Understanding/Misunderstanding scale, two studies were conducted to develop a low-inference, behavioral measure of students' perceived understanding in the college classroom. In Study One (N = 265), a pilot inventory was developed to measure students' perceptions of instructor behaviors that communicate understanding and/or misunderstanding in the college classroom. In Study Two (N = 261), confirmatory factor analyses supported the hypothesized item loadings from the pilot inventory and yielded a new, Student Perceptions of Instructor Understanding Scale (SPIUS). Correlation analyses revealed meaningful associations between the new measure and students' perceptions of teacher confirmation, verbal aggressiveness, and credibility. Keywords: Perceived UnderstandingMisunderstandingTeacher ConfirmationCredibilityVerbal AggressivenessConfirmatory Factor Analysis Notes 1. Due to page restrictions, factor loadings for the pilot inventory are available upon request from the first author. 2. Data screening revealed that the means for all three dimensions of instructor credibility and instructor VA were negatively skewed. Likewise, the mean for students' PIM was positively skewed. We conducted a series of transformations (using the inverse of all scores for the negatively skewed means and the square root for the positively skewed mean), and found no differences in the pattern of results that emerged statistically significant. Slight differences in the magnitude of the beta coefficients did emerge in the regression analyses. However, given no differences in the p-values that were obtained, as well as our desire for comparability and interpretability of results, we reported all analyses using the original means displayed in Table 2. Additional informationNotes on contributorsPaul Schrodt Paul Schrodt (Ph.D., University of Nebraska—Lincoln) is the Philip J. and Cheryl C. Burguières Professor, Associate Professor, and Graduate Director in the Department of Communication Studies at Texas Christian University Amber N. Finn where Amber N. Finn (Ph.D., University of North Texas) is an Assistant Professor