Ji. Rodriguez et al., CLARIFYING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TEACHER NONVERBAL IMMEDIACY AND STUDENT COGNITIVE-LEARNING - AFFECTIVE LEARNING AS THE CENTRAL CAUSAL MEDIATOR, Communication education, 45(4), 1996, pp. 293-305
Recent research advanced a casual model explaining the teacher immedia
cy/student learning relationship by positing the mediational effects o
f students' state motivation to learn. This study argued instead for a
n alternative model which posits that affective learning, not state mo
tivation, is the central causal mediator between teacher immediacy and
students' cognitive learning. To test this causal model, students (N
= 224) were asked to evaluate the instructors of their class meeting i
mmediately after the course where they completed the questionnaires. T
hese surveys included measures of teachers' nonverbal immediacy, stude
nts' state motivation to learn, and affective and cognitive learning.
Path analytic tests of both models indicated that the Affective Learni
ng Model provided the better theoretical explanation for the relations
hip between immediacy and cognitive learning.