“That’s a great question!” instructors’ positive responses to students’ questions improve STEM-related outcomes

ABSTRACT

How instructors respond to students’ questions may serve as an important cue that shapes students’ self-perceptions and motivation. Across five studies, when participants imagined asking questions in a STEM context and receiving a positive (vs. neutral or negative) response from instructors, they felt greater self-efficacy and belonging, which predicted greater intentions to join the lab and to recruit other students. Positive verbal responses were effective regardless of whether they were directed toward participants or other students, occurred in public or private, in STEM or non-STEM settings, and when they came from warm/friendly versus cold/critical professors. Women especially benefitted from receiving positive instructor responses. Instructors’ positive responses to students’ questions may thus be a powerful cue that boosts students’ academic-related outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• STEM
• belonging
• self-efficacy
• motivation
• teaching practices

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2023.2207836

Notes

1. Degrees of freedom varied slightly because two participants did not complete the English class items in the survey.

2. When asking these items, we did not use the terms “positive,” “negative,” or “neutral” in describing the statements.

3. We used this same PROCESS macro and model to analyze the data in Studies 2–4.

4. When conducting moderating effects of gender analyses for these studies, we did not include data from participants who reported their gender as non-binary because there were not enough participants to examine differences between members of this group and other gender groups.

5. Mediation results stayed the same (i.e., the indirect effects remained significant) when target of the instructor response condition (self vs. another student) was not controlled for in Study 2.

6. Mediation results stayed the same (i.e., the indirect effects remained significant) when public versus private condition was not controlled for in Study 3.

7. Because the neutral and negative instructor response conditions did not differ significantly across the dependent variables in this study, we collapsed across these conditions to compare the positive instructor response condition to both of these conditions simultaneously.

8. In Study 5, results of moderation mediation analyses remained the same – i.e., the index of moderated mediation examining instructor warmth condition and lab belonging as the mediator remained significant in predicting the dependent variables – when the positive instructor response condition was compared to the negative response condition. When comparing positive versus neutral response conditions, the index of moderated mediation with lab belonging as the mediator was non-significant for intentions to join the lab, B=−.11, 95% CI [−.26, .06], and intentions to recruit other students to the lab, B=−.08, 95% CI [−.20, .04]..”