Donald Rubin

University of Georgia | UGA · Center for Health and Risk Communication

Health literacy research and practice has focused mainly on the readability of written documents. Yet oral communication plays at least as important a role in the interpersonal ecology in which people make real decisions about their health. Moreover, the single-minded quest for short sentences and simple vocabulary inherent in the readability parad...

Oral health is an integral part of the Healthy People initiative, a 40-year national health promotion and disease prevention effort that sets and monitors objectives with data-driven targets for each decade. The framework for the next decade, Healthy People 2030, includes new components and a focus on health literacy for the first time. This paper...

This study utilized the large-scale, multi-institutional CASSIE dataset to examine the impact of education abroad participation on academic outcomes for first-generation college students. Using robust multivariate matching methodology that effectively minimized self-selection bias, results showed the magnitude of benefit offered by studying abroad...

While some stakeholders presume that studying abroad distracts students from efficient pursuit of their programs of study, others regard education abroad as a high impact practice that fosters student engagement and hence college completion. The Consortium for Analysis of Student Success through International Education (CASSIE), compiled semester-b...

This paper specifically outlines an investigation of the influence of sustainability education and study abroad coursework on levels of a key component of academic success, student engagement. A quasi-experimental design compared pretest and posttest levels of engagement (measured by the Deep Learning Scale) among undergraduate students enrolled in...

As human environmental impacts have increased, so has the desirability of sustainable practices in multiple dimensions and at multiple scales. In this context, sustainability literacy has become a desirable outcome of higher education, driving the advance of sustainability as a core component of higher education institutions’ missions at local, reg...

Higher education institutions are tasked with education for sustainable development, of which the environment is a central pillar. Understanding the demographic factors that influence the establishment of environmental worldviews allows educators to better contextualize sustainability content and discussion. Identifying pedagogies capable of creati...

Purpose Examine association of health literacy (HL) and menu-labeling (ML) usage with sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) intake among adults in Mississippi. Design Quantitative, cross-sectional study. Setting 2016 Mississippi Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data. Participants Adults living in Mississippi (n = 4549). Measures Outcome vari...

This study explores connections between design features of faculty-led short-term study abroad programs and resulting changes in students’ global perspectives. Over 2,000 students provided data for this study, completing the Global Perspective Inventory (GPI) before and after studying abroad. Results indicated that program features such as particip...

Research on the impacts of study abroad participation on world language proficiency indicates positive and significant associations between sojourning abroad and students' self-reported language skills. In recent years, student engagement and ‘deep-learning' have been found to exert powerful effects on student learning outcomes. However, the extent...

As a result of the fact that judgments of non-native speech are closely tied to social biases, oral proficiency ratings are susceptible to error because of rater background and social attitudes. The present study seeks first to estimate the variance attributable to rater background and attitudinal variables on novice raters’ assessments of L2 spoke...

Reflection is an essential process for optimizing student learning outcomes in study abroad. Composing digital stories is a promising strategy for achieving high quality reflection. In this project we developed and explicated a rubric for assessing how students used the d igital storytelling format to reflect on their study abroad experiences. We a...

Understanding the factors that shape individuals’ beliefs about climate change is key to the development of effective climate change communication and education strategies. In this study, we test a path model of the social psychological antecedents of beliefs about climate change and evaluate the effectiveness of an educational travel program in ch...

The Secretary’s Advisory Committee on National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives for 2030 (“the Committee”) has been charged by the Secretary of HHS to make recommendations for developing health objectives for the nation to be achieved by the year 2030. This work was started in late 2016 and has produced several reports that have g...

Research on the impacts of study abroad participation on world language proficiency indicates positive and significant associations between sojourning abroad and students' self-reported language skills. In recent years, student engagement and "deep-learning" have been found to exert powerful effects on student learning outcomes. However, the extent...

This article calls for a common research model that can be replicated across institutions to systematically collect data on the impact of education abroad participation on college graduation rates. The ultimate goal of the proposed GRAD LEAP (Leveraging Education Abroad Participation for Graduation) model is to facilitate a meta-analysis yielding g...

Available at http://nap.edu/24917

Hard-driving belles lettres aside, writing that is too much like speech--rife with sentence fragments, short words, redundancy, and ambiguous reference--comes across as developmentally immature at best. Perhaps less common among English language learners is speech that sounds too much like writing--containing an overabundance of formal diction, und...

Study abroad is believed to be a transformative learning experience for students. However, the extent to which study abroad adds value beyond what is possible on campus needs to be demonstrated. In this paper, we document the learning outcomes assessment undertaken by a faculty-led study-abroad program at a large university in the U.S. Southeast. S...

Global citizenship has emerged as a key objective of liberal education. Because the status of Indigenous Peoples worldwide is inextricably linked to globalization and imperialism, mainstream culture students' attitudes toward the rights of Indigenous Peoples can be taken as an index of global citizenship. The items comprising the Measure of Attitud...

The cultural and linguistic diversity of the U.S. health care provider workforce is expanding. Diversity among health care personnel such as paraprofessional health care assistants (HCAs)-many of whom are immigrants-means that intimate, high-stakes cross-cultural and cross-linguistic contact characterizes many health interactions. In particular, no...

Study abroad has shifted from a marginal opportunity to a core strategy of U.S. colleges and universities, considered integral in the mission to globalize the academic environment. Our study explores the effect of studying abroad and studying about sustainability on students’ global perspectives. A total of 291 university students participated in a...

Patient question-asking is essential to shared decision making. We sought to describe patients' questions when faced with cancer prevention and screening decisions, and to explore differences in question-asking as a function of health literacy with respect to spoken information (health literacy-listening). Four-hundred and thirty-three (433) adults...

Many indigenous groups share a worrying commonality: a significantly shorter life expectancy when compared to the non-indigenous population. Lee Stoner, Rachel Page and Anna Matheson from Massey University, New Zealand, Michael Tarrant, Krystina Stoner and Donald Rubin from University of Georgia, USA and Lane Perry from Western Carolina University,...

Background: Meals on Wheels (MOW) organizations are ideal community partners for delivering social support relating to health information exchange for vulnerable and home-bound older adults. Objectives: This article illustrates how formative organizational evaluation can be used to adapt health literacy interventions delivered by community partners...

Intelligibility problems between native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English are often attributed to some perceived inadequacy of the NNSs. This emphasis on the NNSs’ role in successful communication is highly problematic, given that intelligibility is a negotiated process between speaker and listener. In some cases, NSs have neg...

Homebound older adults constitute a "hardly reached" population with respect to health communication. Older adults also typically suffer from health literacy challenges, which put them at increased risk of adverse health outcomes. Suboptimal interactions with providers are one such challenge. Interventions to improve interactive health literacy foc...

For international service-learning to thrive, it must document student learning outcomes that accrue to participants. The approaches to international service-learning assessment must be compelling to a variety of stakeholders. Recent large-scale projects in study abroad learning outcomes assessment—including the Georgia Learning Outcomes of Student...

Few studies have employed experimental designs adequate for documenting the value added of studying abroad; that is, learning outcomes above and beyond that which may be achieved in domestic or traditional campus-based courses. Using a pre-/posttest, two-by-two factor design of course location (study abroad vs. home campus) by course subject matter...

Pronunciation is not merely accoustics; it has an active social life. Linguistic stereotyping is a robust mechanism of social judgment whereby listeners ascribe a myriad of traits to speakers based often on only very thin samples of pronunciation. The converse social judgmental process is “reverse linguistic stereotyping,” whereby listeners ascribe...

Intergroup contact exercises as a tool for mitigating undergraduates' attitudes toward nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants.

Oral proficiency tests have been frequently criticized for their lack of reliability. Most research on reliability in this language testing domain pertains to inter-rater reliability. Yet intra-rater reliability (the agreement of two or more ratings of the same object performed by the same rater) of oral proficiency rating is not well researched. A...

Recent trends in the conceptualization of health literacy lead toward expansive notions of health literacy as social practice, rather than as a narrower cognitive capacity to understand health-related texts and materials. These expansive and complex constructions of health literacy demand tools for assessing individuals' propensities to actively se...

Government public information officers and risk communicators bear the burden for reaching all Americans with public health and emergency messages. To assess needs specifically regarding communication to reduce health disparities, an Internet survey is made available to members of the National Public Health Information Coalition. Respondents are as...

While a large and growing body of literature addresses the intersection of health and religion/spirituality, this is the first book-length treatment addressing health messaging in, by, and through religiously identified groups. This volume provides a broad perspective on the entire domain of health communication and faith-based contexts and organiz...

In high-stakes oral proficiency testing as well as in everyday encounters, accent is the most salient aspect of nonnative speech. Prior studies of English language learners’ (ELLs’) pronunciation have focused on single parameters of English, such as vowel duration, fundamental frequency as related to intonation, or temporal measures of speech produ...

This presentation summarizes findings from all 6 phases of the GLOSSARI project (Rick Sutton, PI). For information regarding the successor project, the Consortium for Analysis of Student Success Through International Education, please click www.usg.edu/cassie.

Litigation has forced tobacco companies like Philip Morris to disclose more than 7 million internal documents, including previously confidential public relations plans. We draw from this archive, as well as from activist materials, to demonstrate that, despite vigorous industry efforts to thwart them, activists in this case employed strategies of v...

The linguistic stereotyping hypothesis holds that even brief samples of speech varieties associated with low-prestige groups can cue negative attributions regarding individual speakers. The converse phenomenon is reverse linguistic stereotyping (RLS). In RLS, attributions of a speaker’s group membership trigger distorted evaluations of that person’...

A large portion of HIV transmission in sub-Saharan Africa occurs among married couples, yet the majority of research on safer-sex communication has focused on communication between couples in casual relationships. This paper explores how committed Kamba couples in Machakos District, Kenya, communicate about sensitive relational issues. The findings...

This study investigated the use of electronic, web-enabled touch-screen information kiosks as a tool to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate diabetes information to Latino audiences. Two kiosk models (high privacy sit-down, group enabled stand-up) in two locations (pharmacy, community center) in Northeast Georgia provided bilingual, re...

This study employed structured interviews with 307 people living with HIV (PLHIVs) in Nairobi, Kenya to investigate their serostatus disclosure with respect to four types of relationships in their lives: partners, friends, family members, and religious leaders/clergy. Regarding motivations for disclosure, it was found that a sense of duty and seeki...

Understanding why, how, and to whom people living with HIV/AIDS disclose their diagnosis to others is a critical issue for HIV prevention and care efforts, but previous investigations of those issues in sub-Saharan Africa have been limited to one or two questions included in quantitative studies of social support or stigma. Instruments and findings...

Donald Rubin (Ph.D., 1978, University of Minnesota) is jointly appointed as Professor in the Departments of Speech Communication and Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia (USA), where he is also a member of the Linguistics faculty. He regularly teaches courses in intercultural communication, first and second language acquisit...

Previous research has substantiated the targeting of various demographic subgroups by the tobacco industry through marketing practices. However, relatively little research has examined targeting of Asians and Pacific Islanders. Based on prior tobacco document research citing the use of identity-based marketing strategies, a content analytic scheme...

Research on traditional classrooms paints a picture of teachers controlling talk patterns and of students producing minimal amounts of mainly procedural talk, recitation-type talk, or both. Often this bleak state of affairs is attributed to teachers' overreliance on unauthentic display questions—questions that impose tight thematic control and ther...

The present study examines the role of a Vietnamese heritage language school in cross-cultural adaptation, as operationalised by the confluence of two independent variables, language competence and integrated cultural identity. To characterise the students' language competencies and degree of integrated cultural identities, interview questionnaires...

Causal constructions in English convey or deflect responsibility more or less strongly depending on which of three causality markers initiate the phrase or clause. Causal constructions initiated by because usually express strong causality, whereas since and as, when used to express causality, convey a weaker, disjunctive relation. The tobacco indus...

Higher education in general and study abroad programming in particular are hardly strangers to stringent demands for accountability. What is new to higher education and to study abroad is the demand for accountability in terms of measurable student learning outcomes. This article is a first report from a system-wide initiative to document learning...

As a result of litigation over the past decade, major tobacco companies were compelled to make public a broad range of previously confidential documents. We have created a series of corpora from the tobacco industry documents (TIDs) for three purposes: (1) to establish baseline descriptions of various linguistic features of this unique set of texts...

The present studies explored how adolescents process information in making decisions about risk behavior. We studied two developmental aspects of adolescent egocentrism: personal fable (a sense of invulnerability) and imaginary audience (focus on others), along with individual difference variables (sensation seeking, self-esteem, and peer pressure)...

A binocular vision of scholarship in communication education melds perspectives from the fields of communication studies and educational studies. From that vantage, three topical domains can be regarded as comprising communication education: (1) communication about education, (2) education for communication, and (3) communication in education. Focu...

Research on classroom discourse presents a bleak picture. Teachers dominate talk. Students may ask procedural questions and be procedurally eugaged, but they are rarely substantively engaged. To elucidate conditions that do encourage substantively eugaged student talk, this study examined the discourse in an English as a second or other language (E...

This study investigated ways in which gender identity is enacted within written language. Participants first supplied a self-descriptive letter that might be filed with a dating service. Next, they responded to a fabricated personal ad posted by a potential dating partner. Contextual factors in this study were writing task (self-description or resp...

Tremendous resources are spent each year developing programs and messages targeting adolescent risk behavior. Adolescents are often reasonably well educated about methods for health promotion such as preventing HIV infection, yet they fail to act accordingly. One widely used individual difference variable, sensation-seeking, has been incorporated i...

Previous research has rarely examined listening/reading differences in conjunction with conceptually relevant discourse variation. In the present study, college students either listened to or read ghostwritten speeches or magazine articles. Participants also completed tests of listening ability, reading ability, prior knowledge, and amount of inves...

The presence of international instructors on U.S. college campuses is an integral part of the growing multicultural milieu of higher education in this nation. International instructors are often met with resistance, often based on assertions about their linguistic or communicative competence. However a series of recent studies indicates that mainst...

Welcome to our chapter. I use “our” because in some very important ways you and I will be co-constructing this text. In fact, we're already underway. You have already started, no doubt, thinking about me, your author. And I have been thinking long and hard (too long, my editors would probably say) about you, my audience. As I compose, read, and rec...

The standards movement aims to reform K‐12 education in the U.S. by raising expectations for student performance, by applying expectations to all children, and by monitoring achievement through authentic assessments. Prospects for implementing oral communication instruction in classrooms can be enhanced by aligning with this movement. New Standards...

Shifting demographics in the medical professions place increasing numbers of North American patients in contact with pliysicims of non-Western ethnolinguistic backgrounds. Extrapolating from previous language and attitude research in other professional contexts, there is reason to suspect that American patients may have negative responses to nonnat...

Teachers' evaluations of student writing are susceptible to the influence of extraneous factors, including stereotyped expectations based on students' ethnolinguistic identities. Even teachers' detection of surface errors in student writing is vulnerable to such expectancy sets. Non-native speakers of English (NNSs) who exit sheltered ESL classes m...

The theory of reasoned action (TRA) was employed as a framework for understanding adolescents’ behavior that could put them at risk for contracting AIDS. The TRA focuses on the role of subjective norms and attitudes toward behavior to predict behavioral intentions and risk‐avoidance behavior (condom use). Adolescent participants (N = 492) in three...

This article proposes a product of adolescent development, egocentrism, as an important factor in developing health promotion messages. The relations between egocentrism, an outgrowth of adolescent cognitive development, and several persua- sive outcomes related to adolescent risk behavior are explored. Two measures of egocentrism-imaginary audienc...

The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.

Previous research demonstrates a decline across time in gender-exclusive language among language users who are occupationally mandated to conform to nonsexist language guidelines (e.g., journalists). Little prior research, however, bears on changes across time among language users who are not thus constrained. Some prior studies do suggest that ind...

ITAs often experience particular difficulty balancing their roles as teachers with their roles as students. Student communication skills training is warranted for ITAs because it may be more motivating than instructional skills training, because it captures an otherwise elusive segment of the clientele, and because learning can transfer to ITAs'' o...

In an absorption center situated on the grounds of a youth hostel overlooking the Mediterranean, a group of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel struggle during the summer and fall of 1985 to learn to read and write in Hebrew. Along with thousands of others, they are refugees from a deadly famine in their native land. Airlifted 10 months earlier from cam...

In response to dramatic changes in the demographics of graduate education, considerable effort is being deveoted to training teaching assistants who are nonnative speakers of English (NNSTAs). Three studies extend earlier research that showed the potency of nonlanguage factors such as ethnicity in affecting undergraduates'' reactions to NNSTAs. Stu...

The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.

Trends toward increasing globalization increase the likelihood that North American managers will work under the supervision of resident normative senior managers. A considerable body of research documents the role of normative language variation in triggering stereotyped impressions of speakers, but no previous work investigates the effects of this...

Religious speech (i.e. preaching) is a prominent language event, yet it has received scant attention in research on language and attitudes. In recent years, many religious institutions have adopted reforms mandating gender-inclusive (non-sexist) language. Only a few studies have examined the effects of gender-inclusive or gender-exclusive language...

Proposals for gender-inclusive language reforms have been institutionalized by many organizations, but a number of factors may affect individuals' own language behaviors and attitudes in this domain. Previous research has shown the influence of respondents' gender and social affiliations on their willingness to accept gender-inclusive language refo...

The most common response to perceived lack of English language proficiency among nonnative English speaking teaching assistants (NNSTAs), has been to set up workshops to remediate their linguistic and instructional skills. However, many factors other than low levels of communication competence may contribute to negative perceptions of NNSTAs. Some...

English-as-a-Second-Language learners are not always aware of the interference of native culture rhetorical patterns in writing Western academic exposition. Ways to integrate many of those patterns into the discourse norms of academic writing, even when the patterns are oral-based, are described. (55 references) (Author/LB)

Typical teacher performance assessment procedures function to select, retain, and certify competent teachers, but they fail to provide diagnostic information for transforming individuals’ teaching practices. Assessments which result in genuine professional growth help teachers (a) identify recurring patterns In Instructional communication and (b) s...

Theory and research pertaining to relationships between oral and written communication offer support to seemingly contrary hypotheses regarding the development of informational adequacy in speech and in writing. Because the social cognitive demands of face-to-face interaction are less complex than those of prototypical written communication, younge...

Because the language of a multiple choice test is formal and often unfamiliar, certain linguistic features may lead a test-taker to misconstrue the test instructions, questions, or answers. When this happens, a shared understanding of meaning between tester and test-taker is not present, and the test results are invalid. Although this problem exist...

Both research and practical experience indicate that black dialect impedes mobility into mainstream American economic and political life. Blacks may learn to use Standard English as an entre into mainstream American culture and yet still preserve their cultural identities. It is possible that successful blacks retain their cultural identities becau...