Speech and Hearing Sciences ETDs

Publication Date

4-28-1976

Abstract

The Problem. Previous research concerned with teacher-student relationships indicates that teacher accuracy of perception about students facilitates effective teaching; however, most studies focused exclusively on teacher perceptions of students' affective dimension. Given college professors' interest in students' cognitive dimension, the purpose of this investigation was to compare the accuracy of perceptions between professors and students at the University of New Mexico about students' cognitive and affective dimensions. Procedure. Twenty-one male professors and 180 students at the University of New Mexico completed a questionnaire based on the Interpersonal Perception Method (IPM) adapted from Laing, Phillipson, and Lee (1966). The 21 professors, whose average age was 41 years, were randomly chosen from the male faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences who conducted classes with 30 to 50 students during the Fall Semester of 1975. A random sample of 15 students from each class was asked to participate. Results. Professors and students share high accuracy of perception about student task and social behavior. There is little perceptual difference between the two categories of task and social activity, with the exception of professors’ feeling of being more understood about student sociability than about academic performance. Professor and student agreement about their relationship is negatively correlated with perceptual accuracy about student task and social skill in terms of agreement. Agreement about the relationship is also negatively correlated with perceptual accuracy about student task skill in terms of professors' and students’ understanding, and with perceptual accuracy about student social activity in terms of professors' and students’ realization. There is no correlation between professor and student agreement about their relationship and perceptual accuracy about student task and social skill in terms of professors' and students' feeling of being understood. Conclusion. Students' academic performance was not found to be more accurately perceived by professors and students at the University of New Mexico than student sociability was. The highest level of perceptual accuracy was achieved by professors in the category of feeling of being understood about student social behavior. Professors and students feel that they have a good relationship generally, but this has either a negative correlation or no correlation with shared perceptual accuracy. Generally, there was high accuracy of perception, in both social as well as task dimensions, between professors and students in the seven major variables of the 1PM, i.e., agreement, professors' under­standing, students' understanding, professors' realization, students' realization, professors' feeling of being understood, and students' feeling of being understood.

Degree Name

Speech-Language Pathology

Level of Degree

Masters

Department Name

Speech and Hearing Sciences

First Committee Member (Chair)

Lawrence Bernard Rosenfeld

Second Committee Member

Jean Marie Civikly

Third Committee Member

Ella May Small

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Download

Share

COinS