An instructor frequently tells participants anecdotes while using a course presentation that the instructor created: these actions are examples of which concept? It is instructor immediacy and self-disclosure.

These actions are examples of instructor immediacy behaviors combined with self-disclosure. Immediacy is any verbal or nonverbal cue that reduces the psychological distance between teacher and learner. The anecdotes are verbal immediacy and self-disclosure; the self-authored deck is instructor-generated material, which supports content relevance and ownership. Together they raise perceived closeness, attention, and retention.

That answer is the short version. The full answer requires separating several concepts that textbook definitions blur together: teacher immediacy, self-disclosure, relevance cues, and instructor-created material. Each has a distinct mechanism, a distinct evidence base, and distinct failure modes. The interesting science is in why a story attached to a purpose-built slide outperforms either element alone.

Mechanism: distance reduction and dual coding

Immediacy theory, developed most fully by Virginia Richmond and James McCroskey in the 1980s, treats effective teaching as a communication problem before it is a content problem. Learners process instruction through a social channel and a cognitive channel at once. The social channel evaluates the teacher as warm, approachable, or distant. The cognitive channel allocates attention and working memory to content. Immediacy behaviors operate on the social channel, but their effect on the cognitive channel is indirect and sizable.

An anecdote does three things simultaneously. It provides a concrete episodic instance of an abstract rule, which supports transfer. It reveals something about the speaker, which triggers the social-evaluative machinery. And it interrupts the monotony of declarative presentation, which produces a small arousal spike that can reset attention. The self-authored slide adds a fourth element: the artifact and the story are congruent, so the learner infers that the example was chosen for this material rather than borrowed.

Dual coding theory explains the retention effect. A verbal story paired with a visual slide creates two retrieval routes for the same idea. If the slide shows a decision tree and the story narrates a failed branch, the learner can recover the concept from either cue. Mayer's multimedia learning research established that coordinated verbal and visual channels outperform either channel alone when they are aligned rather than redundant.

Plain version: a story tied to a purpose-built slide gives learners two handles on one idea, and the story also makes the instructor seem like a person.

The mechanism has a boundary. Cognitive load theory predicts that a story competes for working memory with the content it illustrates. If the anecdote is long, tangential, or emotionally loaded, it can displace the material it was meant to anchor. The benefit curve is not monotonic.

Quantified context: effect sizes and dose ranges

Teacher immediacy is one of the most replicated constructs in instructional communication. Meta-analytic work by Witt, Wheeless, and Allen in 2004 found a substantial positive correlation between perceived immediacy and cognitive learning, in the range of r = .5, with a stronger association for affective learning. That correlation is not causation, and it likely runs partly in the opposite direction: engaged students perceive more warmth.

Dose ranges matter for course design. Verbal immediacy inventories typically score 15 to 20 behaviors, and effective instructors show a mix rather than a single signature move. Self-disclosure research distinguishes low-risk from high-risk disclosure. Low-risk disclosures, such as a brief story about a mistake the instructor made learning the material, improve perceived approachability. High-risk disclosures, such as personal crisis narratives, produce inconsistent effects and can harm credibility when they are frequent.

Presentation-level numbers are more modest and more actionable. In multimedia learning studies, adding a short personal narrative or conversational phrasing to slides commonly improves retention by roughly 5 to 15 percentage points over the same content delivered in formal register, though effects vary by measurement and population. These are typical ranges, not universal constants.

Professional caveat: the correlation between warmth and learning is inflated by shared-method variance. Many studies measure both variables with student self-report on the same instrument. That is the counterintuitive detail worth holding onto: perceived immediacy is partly a measurement artifact of asking students how they feel about the class and then asking how much they feel they learned.

Edge cases: when stories and self-made slides backfire

Several conditions flip the effect. Cultural norms matter: immediacy behaviors validated in US classrooms show weaker and sometimes reversed associations in settings that expect formal teacher-student distance. Class size matters: verbal immediacy is easier to sustain and read in sections under about 40 learners; in large lecture halls, nonverbal immediacy, especially movement and eye contact, carries more of the signal.

Subject matter matters. In technical and quantitative courses, tangents are judged more harshly because the cost of lost practice time is visible. Instructors in those settings do better with worked-example anecdotes than with personal ones.

The self-authored material carries its own risks. Instructor-created slides are frequently less polished than publisher decks, and inaccuracies in a self-made deck are attributable entirely to the instructor. Research on instructor-generated materials shows benefits in relevance and currency, but a clear downside: errors erode trust faster than polished third-party errors do, because the learner infers the instructor's competence directly from the artifact.

Red flags for the combined behavior set: The anecdote is longer than the concept it illustrates. The same story is reused every term without updating the facts around it. The self-disclosure is about unresolved personal conflict rather than professional experience. The slide and the story contradict each other on a factual claim. Stories cluster in the first session and vanish afterward, signaling performance rather than pedagogy.

Misconceptions: what these behaviors are not

The most common misconception is that the actions are primarily examples of storytelling or narrative pedagogy. Narrative pedagogy is a deliberate curricular approach in which stories carry the disciplinary content and structure. Anecdotes are smaller instruments. Calling any classroom story narrative pedagogy overstates the design work involved.

A second misconception is that the self-made deck is evidence of student-centered teaching. Building your own slides is a materials decision, not an instructional method. It correlates with responsiveness to a specific cohort, but it can coexist with pure lecture and zero interaction.

A third misconception equates immediacy with being liked. Immediacy is about perceived closeness, and perceived closeness can coexist with demanding standards. The strongest evidence favors instructors who are both warm and academically rigorous, not warm instead of rigorous.

A fourth misconception treats self-disclosure as an engagement lever to be pulled for ratings. Students detect instrumental disclosure. Disclosure that exists to build rapport and nothing else is recognized as such and discounted.

Alternatives compared: how the same goal is reached

The table makes the design trade-off explicit. The combined anecdote-plus-own-slides approach wins on cost and fit, loses on scalability, and depends on the instructor's accuracy.

Timeline: what happens across a session and a term

The practical read of that sequence is that timing is a design variable. The same anecdote placed at minute 12 does more work than at minute 2, when attention is already high.

Practical actions: steps and thresholds

Use these as concrete defaults, then adjust from student feedback.

Cap each anecdote at 60 to 90 seconds. If it needs more, it is a case study and should be designed as one. Attach every story to exactly one concept on the slide, and label the slide with the concept name so the cue is explicit. Add a 5 to 10 second bridge sentence after the story that restates the principle in plain words. This is the step most instructors skip, and it converts a pleasant story into a retrievable example. Keep low-risk self-disclosure to roughly 1 to 3 instances per session early in the term, mostly about professional errors or learning struggles. Audit self-made slides for accuracy before each term. Mark claims with dates where facts change, and keep a corrections log. Collect a midterm immediacy and story-recall check. Two questions suffice: which concept did each story illustrate, and was the personal content useful, neutral, or distracting.

The threshold reconciliation matters because the sources emphasize different numbers. Instructional-communication research measures a long list of small behaviors and reports an aggregate correlation. Multimedia research measures short interventions and reports percentage-point retention differences. These are not competing claims about one threshold; they describe different units. Treat the behavioral inventory as a checklist and the retention figures as an upper bound for any single intervention.

Limitations: what the evidence cannot establish

Causal claims outrun the data. Most immediacy research is cross-sectional and self-reported. Strong experimental work exists for multimedia design principles, but it rarely isolates the instructor's self-made slide as a variable. The honest statement is that the behaviors are well-supported as correlates of positive learning outcomes and moderately supported as causes.

Replication quality varies. Older immediacy studies used instruments with modest reliability, and cultural transfer to non-US settings is uneven. Generalization to online asynchronous formats is especially weak; an anecdote delivered on video has different social-cue value than one delivered live.

Measurement is the persistent weak point. Learners cannot accurately report learning, and researchers keep asking them to. Where possible, prefer performance data over satisfaction data when judging whether a story worked.

The combined behavior is best understood as a low-cost, moderate-yield instructional choice: it improves perceived closeness and often supports recall. It is not the main determinant of learning, and it is easily overdone.

This article is general educational information about instructional communication and learning science, not a diagnosis, treatment plan, legal opinion, or investment recommendation. It does not promise any outcome from a teaching method. For decisions that affect student welfare, accreditation, or accommodations, consult a qualified local professional in education or your institution's teaching center.