An Exploration of College Instructors' Use of Classroom Justice, Power, and Behavior Alteration Techniques

Abstract

A growing body of research indicates that classroom justice concerns are important to students. When students perceive their instructors are not concerned about justice, they report a host of negative outcomes. Due to the importance of justice assigned to students, the present study sought to understand how instructors view justice. Results indicated that college instructors view interactional justice as the most important fairness component. Their use of power and antisocial behavior alteration techniques (BATs) plays a role in these fairness judgments, accounting for a significant amount of variance in procedural and interactional justice. However, power and antisocial BATs use appear to play little role in instructors' concerns over distributive justice. Results, limitations, and future research are discussed.