Student Emails

For many of us, this week we begin to recognize our students, perhaps recall a few names and settle into a routine. We also begin to receive communication, often in emails. So, I would like to share a paper entitled, "Two Minute Training in Class Significantly Increases the Use of Professional Formatting in Student to Faculty Email Correspondence" by Aguilar-Roca, et al.

The goal of this study was to document the frequency of specific formatting mistakes that contribute to unfavorable perception of student emails and to determine if training could reduce these errors. They analyzed emails from two sections of a large biology class, one section received two minutes of basic email etiquette training, the other served as a control. They reported a significant increase in overall professional quality of emails in the trained class.

On the first day, the treatment group received instructions on email formatting, based on rules of etiquette commonly found in handbooks (Shipley & Schwalbe, 2007). Students were told instructors would be less likely to respond to messages from a non-university email account, containing no subject, lack of proper salutations, text message abbreviations, ending without a name. They further requested that in the body of the email, to use full sentences with punctuation and reasonable grammar and to sign their name. Authors showed that a two-minute training with one additional slide can increase the use of professional formatting of emails.

Aguilar-Roca, N.; Williams, A.; Warrior, R; & O’Dowd, D. (2009) "Two Minute Training in Class Significantly Increases the Use of Professional Formatting in Student to Faculty Email Correspondence," International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 3(1), Article 15. Available at: https://doi.org/10.20429/ijsotl.2009.030115