Student-to-student communication: examining and extending our conceptualization and measurement of instructional dissent

Abstract

ABSTRACT Instructional dissent has been studied for over a decade. Expressive dissent, a subset of instructional dissent, focuses specifically on when students are complaining to one or more other students. This article lays out instructional dissent’s origins in organizational psychology and organizational communication. From there, the article homes in specifically on the predictors and correlates of expressive dissent, which focuses attention on student–student communication. Within this section, student, instructor, and class characteristics are addressed, concluding with a call for testing the full Instructional Beliefs Model to (1) assess the interconnections of these three components and (2) find a combination of factors that explains expressive dissent across a variety of learners and situations. Research implications call for methodological strategies, such as better reporting and validity testing, as well as theory building to achieve stronger results that can be turned into practical implications for both students and instructors.