Academic Incivility Scale (AIS)

1. Abstract

The Academic Incivility Scale (AIS) is a 33-item self-report questionnaire developed by Laurie O. Campbell, Jessica Tinstman Jones, Claudia C. Sutter, and Jaimie Stickl Haugen in 2024 to assess higher education students’ perceptions of the frequency and nature of uncivil behaviors occurring within postsecondary learning environments. Designed to reflect contemporary educational ecosystems, the AIS specifically evaluates interpersonal and behavioral disruptions across face-to-face, fully remote, and blended or hybrid learning formats. The instrument operationalizes academic incivility along two empirically derived dimensions: Interpersonal Communication (encompassing overt, targeted, hostile, or demeaning communications) and Personal Conduct (capturing passive disengagement, academic dishonesty, technological disruptions, and non-compliance with scholarly norms).

Initially conceptualized from an extensive interdisciplinary review of classroom and workplace incivility, bullying, and cyber-aggression literature, an initial pool of 40 candidate items was subjected to rigorous content validation. Subsequent exploratory factor analysis (EFA) refined the tool into a 33-item two-factor solution accounting for 60% of the total variance. The AIS demonstrates exceptional internal consistency, with a full-scale Cronbach’s alpha of α = 0.973, alongside subscale coefficients of α = 0.972 for Interpersonal Communication and α = 0.890 for Personal Conduct. Construct validity is supported through significant convergent associations with existing classroom incivility measures (ρ = 0.585, p < 0.001) and theoretically coherent divergent associations with dispositional empathy (ρ = −0.391, p < 0.001). Administered via electronic survey methods utilizing Likert-style frequency response options, the AIS offers researchers, faculty developers, and university administrators an empirically validated metric for diagnosing toxic relational climates, guiding instructional policy, and evaluating the efficacy of pedagogical interventions aimed at fostering civil, inclusive, and academically productive collegiate environments.

2. Keywords

Academic Incivility Scale, classroom incivility, higher education, psychometrics, learning environments, interpersonal communication, student misconduct, disruptive classroom behavior, remote learning, hybrid education, factor analysis, instrument validation, scale development.

3. Authors

The Academic Incivility Scale was developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers based at the University of Central Florida (UCF) in Orlando, Florida, United States:

• Laurie O. Campbell, Ed.D. — Associate Professor of Instructional Design and Technology, Department of Learning Sciences and Educational Research, College of Community Innovation and Education, University of Central Florida. Primary research focus includes digital learning environments, instructional design, and learner engagement across modern educational platforms. (Corresponding Author: [email protected]).
• Jessica Tinstman Jones, Ph.D. — Researcher and Counselor Educator, Department of Counselor Education and School Psychology, University of Central Florida. Expertise centers on interpersonal dynamics, student well-being, and social-emotional factors impacting collegiate development.
• Claudia C. Sutter, Ph.D. — Assistant Professor of Counselor Education, University of Central Florida. Research areas include relational aggression, counseling pedagogy, and crisis intervention in educational institutions.
• Jaimie Stickl Haugen, Ph.D. — Assistant Professor of Counselor Education, University of Central Florida. Specializes in school-based mental health, measurement development, and climate evaluation within secondary and postsecondary learning contexts.

4. Purpose

Academic environments are increasingly recognized as complex social ecosystems wherein relational friction can profoundly undermine cognitive processing, psychological safety, and educational retention. For decades, scholarship on postsecondary disruptions focused predominantly on physical lecture halls. However, the swift proliferation of online, blended, synchronous video, and asynchronous educational models has altered the behavioral topography of higher education. Incivility in collegiate settings is no longer restricted to physical class disruptions or vocal interruptions; it manifests in digital spaces through flaming, cyber-ostracism, passive non-responsiveness during collaborative group assignments, and unauthorized technological multitasking during live instructional periods. The primary purpose of the Academic Incivility Scale (AIS) is to furnish an updated, theoretically sound, and psychometrically robust measurement tool capable of assessing students’ perceptions of the frequency and typologies of incivility across traditional, remote, and hybrid course delivery formats.

From an applied perspective, the AIS serves multiple interconnected diagnostic and pedagogical functions:

• Institutional Climate Auditing: University administrators, academic deans, and ombudspersons can employ the AIS to conduct broad-scale environmental scans, identifying systemic patterns of relational toxicity, microaggressions, or professional misconduct within particular colleges, academic departments, or demographic cohorts.
• Course-Level Diagnostics: Faculty members can utilize the AIS as a formative mid-semester or summative end-of-term diagnostic instrument to evaluate the relational health of their classrooms. Data derived from the tool allow instructors to distinguish between interpersonal aggression among peers and broad-scale detachment from course norms.
• Intervention and Policy Evaluation: As institutions design, pilot, and implement restorative justice programs, syllabi netiquette clauses, or civility-based onboarding workshops, the AIS provides an objective pre-test/post-test metric to evaluate changes in observed classroom interactions.
• Empirical Research in Educational Psychology: The scale enables scholars to test multivariate structural models examining the mediating and moderating relationships between perceived incivility, academic burnout, cognitive load, student self-efficacy, retention rates, and academic performance.

By establishing a standardized metric that bridges physical and virtual instruction, the AIS resolves a notable methodological gap in the educational research literature, enabling higher education stakeholders to systematically detect, monitor, and ameliorate conditions that erode collegiate learning communities.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct of Academic Incivility broadly denotes speech or action that violates institutional, professional, and interpersonal norms of mutual respect, psychological safety, and academic integrity within an educational setting. Incivility is typically characterized as low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm the target, although its chronic manifestation yields cumulative, severe psychological consequences. In developing the AIS, Campbell et al. (2024) conceptualized academic incivility as a multidimensional operational construct comprising two primary behavioral domains: Interpersonal Communication and Personal Conduct.

Interpersonal Communication

The Interpersonal Communication dimension captures overt, active, and relational violations that occur directly between participants in the academic community (student-to-student or student-to-instructor). This dimension encompasses direct verbal hostility, written disparagement, condescending commentary, and weaponized non-verbal cues. In modern digital and hybrid modalities, this facet manifests as cyber-incivility, including toxic communications in discussion boards, hostile private direct messages, sarcastic interjections during synchronous video conferences, and collective exclusionary practices during collaborative team projects.

Behaviors measured under this subscale challenge the target’s psychological safety and academic credibility. Examples include:

• Publicly ridiculing or belittling an individual’s intellectual contribution or viewpoint during class discussions.
• Engaging in digital flaming, vitriolic messaging, or using aggressive capitalization and punctuation in online communicative channels.
• Interrupting peers or professors with the intent to undermine their authority or demean their presentation.
• Spreading malicious rumors or weaponizing social media channels to ostracize specific classmates or instructional personnel.

Personal Conduct

The Personal Conduct dimension assesses passive, non-normative, and self-centered disruptive behaviors that erode the collective learning environment without necessarily targeting a specific individual with overt relational hostility. These behaviors represent a breakdown in scholarly responsibility, basic etiquette, and active academic presence. While less directly aggressive, disruptions within the Personal Conduct domain degrade instructional continuity, distract fellow learners, and impose unnecessary cognitive load on the entire learning community.

Behaviors situated within the Personal Conduct dimension frequently include:

• Engaging in off-task technological behavior during lectures, such as gaming, browsing social media, or watching non-course videos in plain view of peers.
• Consistently arriving late, departing early, or engaging in loud packing-up routines while instructional activities are actively ongoing.
• Demonstrating persistent non-responsiveness or academic freeloading during structured small-group activities or asynchronous peer collaborations.
• Exhibiting visible expressions of apathy, dismissive posture, sleeping during presentations, or overtly ignoring established course deadlines and operational guidelines.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the Academic Incivility Scale synthesizes theoretical models from organizational behavior, social psychology, and contemporary distance education pedagogy. Three primary theoretical frameworks underpin the scale’s design: the Incivility Spiral Model, Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, and the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework.

The Incivility Spiral Model

Originally formulated in organizational psychology by Andersson and Pearson (1999), the Incivility Spiral Model posits that organizational incivility begins with minor, ambiguous violations of mutual respect. When left unchecked, these subtle infractions erode psychological safety, provoking counter-incivilities from targets or observers. This escalation creates an interactive spiral that can culminate in overt hostility, bullying, and systemic interpersonal withdrawal.

Applying this model to collegiate environments, Campbell et al. (2024) recognized that academic classrooms mirror workplace cultures. When an individual engages in minor disruptive personal conduct (e.g., cell phone usage, disengagement), it signals an absence of accountability. This perceived norm violation frequently triggers retaliatory or cascading behaviors across peer networks, evolving into direct interpersonal hostility. The AIS captures this behavioral continuum, enabling researchers to track incivility from low-intensity baseline misconduct to acute relational conflict.

Social Cognitive Theory

According to Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory (1986), human functioning is the product of continuous reciprocal interactions among cognitive/personal factors, behavioral patterns, and environmental influences (reciprocal determinism). In educational settings, observational modeling dictates normative classroom conduct. When students observe peers or instructors engaging in disrespectful communications or disengaged conduct without negative consequences, their cognitive thresholds for acceptable behavior shift.

The AIS operationalizes these modeled behaviors. By measuring how frequently students perceive both interpersonal and conduct-based incivilities, the instrument measures the degree to which an academic environment exhibits normative deviance, which directly affects student motivation, self-regulation, and behavioral compliance.

The Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework

In developing a scale suited for multi-modal instruction (face-to-face, online, and hybrid), the authors drew upon the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework established by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (1999). The CoI framework asserts that meaningful higher-order learning in digital and hybrid settings depends on three core elements: Cognitive Presence, Teaching Presence, and Social Presence.

Academic incivility serves as a direct threat to Social Presence—the ability of participants to project their personal characteristics into the community and establish collaborative, trusting relationships. When online message boards or video lectures are punctuated by dismissive, aggressive, or passive-aggressive remarks, social presence deteriorates into alienation. The AIS provides a direct assessment of the disruptions that destabilize the CoI model, clarifying why uncivil classroom climates consistently impair collaborative cognitive inquiry.

7. Validity

The psychometric evaluation of the Academic Incivility Scale demonstrates robust content, convergent, and discriminant validity, confirming that the tool accurately captures the intended behavioral domain while retaining empirical distinction from adjacent psychological constructs.

Content Validity

The preliminary development phase commenced with a systematic review of contemporary empirical literature regarding academic harassment, workplace incivility, cyberbullying, and classroom management. An initial pool of 40 draft items was constructed to address potential manifestations of incivility across in-person, fully online, and hybrid pedagogical settings. These candidate items were subsequently evaluated by a panel of educational researchers, instructional designers, and clinical counseling experts. The panel reviewed each item for semantic clarity, developmental appropriateness for higher education populations, theoretical alignment, and cross-modality relevance. Items demonstrating conceptual redundancy or ambiguous wording were eliminated or revised, yielding a refined pool for empirical testing.

Convergent Validity

To verify convergent validity, the authors evaluated the relationship between the AIS and an established measure of classroom disruption: the Attitudes Toward Classroom In/Civility Questionnaire. As hypothesized by theoretical models of educational behavior, students’ perceptions of the frequency of uncivil incidents on the AIS demonstrated a statistically significant, moderate-to-strong positive correlation with the comparative incivility instrument:

Discriminant / Divergent Validity

Discriminant validity was assessed by examining the empirical relationship between the AIS and the Toronto Empathy Scale. Theoretically, elevated perceptions and endorsements of incivility should correlate inversely with empathy, as high empathic concern inhibits interpersonally damaging behavior and buffers against aggressive interpretations of peer actions. Consistent with theoretical expectations:

8. Reliability

The Academic Incivility Scale exhibits high internal consistency reliability across both of its primary factors and the overall instrument, exceeding standard psychometric criteria for exploratory and applied diagnostic usage (α ≥ 0.70 to 0.80).

Internal Consistency Metrics

Reliability analyses conducted on the final 33-item version yielded the following parameters:

• Overall Academic Incivility Scale (Full 33-Item Instrument): Cronbach’s α = 0.973. This high reliability coefficient reflects strong item homogeneity and minimal measurement error when evaluating academic incivility as a composite structural phenomenon.
• Factor 1: Interpersonal Communication: Cronbach’s α = 0.972. The high coefficient confirms that the items assessing verbal hostility, targeted insults, online harassment, and active communicative disruption function with high internal precision.
• Factor 2: Personal Conduct: Cronbach’s α = 0.890. This coefficient indicates that the items indexing passive disengagement, technological distractions, arriving late, and non-compliance with scholastic expectations reliably capture student conduct norms.

Measurement Precision and Considerations

While an alpha level exceeding 0.95 (as observed in the full scale and Factor 1) provides strong statistical reliability, psychometricians sometimes note that exceptionally elevated values may suggest slight item redundancy within the item pool. However, in behavioral frequency inventories designed for broad institutional auditing, such item density provides high diagnostic granularity, ensuring that distinct behavioral variations (e.g., chat flaming vs. oral interrupting) are adequately evaluated without sacrificing scale coherence.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the AIS was established through an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) conducted with a diverse sample of higher education students enrolled across physical, hybrid, and remote instructional modalities in the United States.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) Implementation

Prior to factor extraction, data suitability was evaluated through the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity, both meeting established psychometric criteria for factor extraction. The initial 40 candidate items were analyzed using common factor extraction methods paired with an oblique rotation (e.g., Promax), accommodating the expected empirical correlation between different forms of academic misconduct.

Factor Retention and Item Reduction

The extraction criteria utilized a convergence of eigenvalues greater than 1.0 (Kaiser-Guttman rule), visual examination of the scree plot inflection points, and parallel analysis. The factor analysis clearly supported a two-factor structure. During this analytic phase, seven items were removed from the initial 40-item instrument due to low primary factor loadings (< 0.40), substantial cross-loadings across both dimensions, or low communalities.

Collectively, the two extracted factors account for 60% of the total variance, meeting the standard 60% threshold recommended in educational and behavioral psychometrics for multidimensional constructs. Factor 1 captures behaviors characterized by active relational friction, whereas Factor 2 captures behavioral negligence and passive disruptions.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structural, administrative, and evaluative characteristics of the Academic Incivility Scale are summarized below:

• Test Type: Original self-report behavioral frequency inventory / psychometric questionnaire.
• Target Population: Adult higher education students (undergraduate and graduate cohorts, aged 18 years and older).
• Target Settings: Higher education institutions; applicable across traditional face-to-face lecture environments, synchronous virtual classrooms (e.g., Zoom, Microsoft Teams), asynchronous web courses (e.g., Canvas, Blackboard), and blended/hybrid formats.
• Administration Method: Electronic survey delivery (e.g., Qualtrics, REDCap, institutional learning management system modules); can also be adapted for paper-and-pencil administrative formats.
• Estimated Completion Time: Approximately 8 to 12 minutes.
• Total Number of Items: 33 finalized items (reduced from an initial 40-item candidate pool).
• Factor Structure:
  • Factor 1: Interpersonal Communication (targeted hostilities, verbal disrespect, flaming, communicative disruption).
  • Factor 2: Personal Conduct (technological distractions, passive disengagement, class norm non-compliance, academic dishonesty).
• Response Format: Items are presented on a Likert-style frequency response scale, evaluating how often a specific behavior was observed within a targeted course or institutional context over an identified reporting window (e.g., 1 = Never, 2 = Rarely, 3 = Sometimes, 4 = Often, 5 = Very Often / Always).
• Scoring and Aggregation:
  • Subscale Scores: Calculated by summing or averaging the items associated with each respective factor. Higher average scores indicate more frequent observed incivilities in that behavioral domain.
  • Composite Total Score: Calculated by summing or averaging all 33 items, providing an overall index of classroom or institutional incivility frequency.
  • Data Interpretation: Mean scores approaching higher values signal learning environments at elevated risk of psychological detachment, relational conflict, and reduced instructional efficacy.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Academic Incivility Scale was published in 2024 in the peer-reviewed journal Learning Environments Research (Springer Nature). The citation for the foundational development study is:

Campbell, L. O., Tinstman Jones, J., Sutter, C. C., & Stickl Haugen, J. (2024). The development of the Academic Incivility Scale for higher education. Learning Environments Research, 27(2), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10984-023-09478-6

Copyright and Permitted Usage Guidelines:

• Proprietary Ownership: The psychometric structure, text, and specific item inventory are copyrighted by Springer Nature and the original scale authors.
• Academic and Non-Commercial Research: Use of the scale for non-commercial academic research, university teaching evaluation, institutional quality improvement, or doctoral dissertation studies typically requires formal permission from the corresponding author or the publisher under standard academic Fair Dealing / Fair Use frameworks.
• Commercial Applications: Any commercial deployment, inclusion within proprietary software platforms, corporate workplace training applications, or for-profit institutional audits requires explicit written licensing agreements from Springer Nature and the primary author.
• Contact Protocol: To obtain the authorized, complete, verbatim 33-item administration instrument, scoring manuals, or institutional permissions, interested scholars must contact the corresponding developer, Dr. Laurie O. Campbell, directly at: [email protected].

12. References

Andersson, L. M., & Pearson, C. M. (1999). Tit for tat? The spiraling effect of incivility in the workplace. Academy of Management Review, 24(3), 452–471. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1999.2202131

Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Campbell, L. O., Tinstman Jones, J., Sutter, C. C., & Stickl Haugen, J. (2024). The development of the Academic Incivility Scale for higher education. Learning Environments Research, 27(2), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10984-023-09478-6

Clark, C. M. (2008). The continuum of incivility to aggressive behavior in nursing education. Nurse Educator, 33(1), 4–10. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.NNE.0000299504.86059.ff

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (1999). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2–3), 87–105. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1096-7516(00)00016-6

Spreng, R. N., McKinnon, M. C., Mar, R. A., & Levine, B. (2009). The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire: Scale development and initial validation of a factor-analytic solution to empathy measurement. Journal of Personality Assessment, 91(1), 62–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223890802484381

13. Items of the Scale