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Abstract Successfully evaluating students' work challenges teachers to achieve both corrective task and identity-protection goals in interaction. This study investigated how face-threat mitigation that students received from their teachers during feedback influenced students' judgments about the quality and usefulness of the feedback their instructors provided and their perceptions of those instructors' credibility. Public-speaking students (N=356) at three universities were surveyed about their instructors' feedback regarding their first graded speech that term. Multiple regression analyses showed that receiving attentive facework during instructional feedback predicted students' perceptions that feedback was fair and useful. Skilled instructional facework also predicted students' less defensive responses to criticism and their higher credibility ratings of their instructors. Findings support attentive instructional facework as a communication mechanism whose skillful use aids feedback's reception and integration and enhances instructors' credibility as worthy feedback providers. Keywords: Speech FeedbackCriticismEffectivenessFaceworkPolitenessCredibility Notes 1. Some communication research has posed a third dimension of credibility, called caring. Unlike the competence and character dimensions of an instructor's perceived personality, caring is an attribution tied to how the instructor seems to interact with students (e.g., the degree to which the instructor demonstrates caring or concern for the students' best interests; McCroskey & Teven, 1999). Because this interactional attribution shows significant conceptual overlap with perceptions of teachers' positive facework (i.e., instructors' tacit messages about students' competence and worth), this potentially confounding credibility dimension was not assessed in the study. 2. Some students from these and additional speech classes also participated in a separate data collection session at the end of the semester (see Kerssen-Griep et al., 2008). Additional informationNotes on contributorsApril R. Trees April Trees (Ph.D. 1999, University of Washington) is Assistant Professor of Communication at Saint Louis University Jeff Kerssen-Griep Jeff Kerssen-Griep (Ph.D. 1997, University of Washington) is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Portland Jon A. Hess Jon Hess (Ph.D. 1996, University of Minnesota) is Professor of Communication at the University of Dayton
Trees et al. (Tue,) studied this question.