Compliance‐resistance in the college classroom

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Abstract
Instruction in the college classroom is commonly, but inaccurately described as “easy to manage”; simply because students are supposed to have outgrown aggravating behaviors unique to adolescents. In fact, what college instructors face are new types of student resistance to their attempts to motivate on‐task learning behavior. Examining student resistance to teacher compliance‐gaining efforts, this investigation inductively derived a typology of students’ compliance‐resistance strategies that are frequently used in the college classroom. A sample of 574 college students constructed messages resisting one of four teacher compliance‐gaining scenarios. The unitizing and subsequent coding of 2,916 messages resulted in 19 separate categories which were then labeled. Research questions probed the impact of teacher immediacy and type of strategy employed by teachers on student message generation and whether likelihood of resistance was related to the number of messages generated.