Advancing Minority STEM Students’ Communication and Presentation Skills through Cocurricular Training Activities

Lack of confidence and ineffective preparation are believed to be major obstacles experienced by Thai students required to give oral presentations in English.Self-assessment is one possible solution to help students with this problem.This study was conducted with a group of Thai university students to find out (a) whether and (b) how video recordings facilitate the students' evaluation of their oral presentation skills and use of their evaluations to improve their performance.The research instruments were video recordings of the students' two presentations and questionnaires that asked the students to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses in both presentations.The data shows that the students had positive attitudes towards video recording their presentations, especially since this helped them to notice and identify their weaknesses in non-verbal language use.Overall, the process studied was found to facilitate the students' self-evaluation skills, resulting in the improvement of their presentation skills.Learner-centeredness has been a concern of educators since the late 1960s (Benson, 2008;Dickinson, 1987).This concept exemplifies the shift from teacher-directed learning to an autonomous learning approach that aims to promote learner independence and processoriented learning (Sinclair, 2000).Holec (1981, p. 3) defined autonomy as "the ability to take charge of one's own learning," and clarified that this includes "determining the objectives, defining the contents and progressions, selecting methods and techniques to be used, monitoring the procedures of acquisition…and evaluating what has been acquired."Dam (2000) added that learners' self-evaluation of their own linguistic competence as well as their performance and social behavior can increase active involvement in the actual teaching and learning situation.Additionally, Wenden (1999) stated that it is essential to enable learners to gain self-monitoring strategies for them to identify the cause of their own difficulties and how to deal with them.An alternative, according to Oxford (1990), is to get students into the habit of self-reflection, a metacognitive strategy that enables them to manage their learning.

A two-year targeted intervention designed to improve students’ oral communication skills in an organic chemistry laboratory course is described. The study compares the oral communication skills of groups who received interventions versus those who did not. The collaborative effort involving chemistry and English faculty and an instruction librarian assessed student performance on several measures of oral communication competency. Participants blindly placed themselves in either treatment or control groups. Both groups received identical basic instruction on poster layout and design. The treatment group received additional instruction on multiple aspects of oral communication and presentation skills. A comparison of the outcomes of the two groups found that those receiving the additional targeted interventions performed better on measures such as the ability to describe clearly the research project and fluency with scientific terminology.

Communication skills are one of the skills that a person must have when entering the world of work. The workforce in a company that lacks mastering 21st century skills will be at a disadvantage to compete globally, and will have difficulty in dealing with challenges that arise along with the with the development of science and technology. So, in higher education such as university, the curriculum, course, and learning should provide the activities that could improve and construct students’ communications skills. STEM is one of the learning approaches that could help to construct students’ communication skills. Research objective is to investigate how is the development of oral science communications skills of undergraduate students in Environmental learning by using STEM learning approaches. The method of this research is qualitative research by the data taken from observation and teaching learning video recording transcriptions. The transcription is coded by the assessment of science communication rubrics adapted from Baltimore University for oral science communication. The data are taken from students’ presentation activities in environmental courses. This research result shows that responsiveness indicators is 88,3%, multimedia supported as technology skills is 83,3%, and conclusions indicators is 50,0%. It could be concluded that STEM learning approaches could be constructed students’ oral communications skills. Responsiveness and multimedia support of oral communications skills indicators are outperformed than conclusion as the least performed of oral communications skills.

Reducing accounting students' oral communication apprehension: Empirical evidence

This research aims to improve students' communication skills through the application of the window shopping learning model for tissue lessons in class XI-6 SMA Negeri 9 Semarang. This type of research is Collaborative Classroom Action Research (PTKK) and is carried out in 2 research cycles. The research subjects were 36 students in class XI-6 of SMA Negeri 9 Semarang. The objects of research are oral, written and interpersonal communication skills. The instruments used are observation and documentation sheets. The results of the research conducted showed that there was an increase in students' oral, written and interpersonal communication skills which were observed from the pre-cycle, cycle I and cycle II. Oral communication skills in pre-cycle were 44.4% in the sufficient category, cycle I was 58.3% in the sufficient category and in cycle II were 75.9% in the good category, while written communication skills in the pre-cycle were 57.4% in the sufficient category, cycle I 72.3% in the good category and in the second cycle 82.2% in the very good category, as well as interpersonal communication skills in the pre-cycle 61.1% in the good category, in the first cycle 71.0% in the good category and in the second cycle it was 82.26 very good category.

Communication skill is one of the most crucial skills that Software Engineering (SE) industry demands. According to literature, it is evident that oral communication, feedback, and presentation skills are the most crucial among all. SE curriculums need to be structured to prepare its undergraduates to meet these demands. Due to Covid-19 pandemic, most universities opted for online education. Therefore, communication skill development inevitably needed to be conducted remotely. Current mechanisms used in these remote sessions do not cater to unique needs of SE industry. This paper proposes a design of a plugin to be used with Zoom to analyze and improve student's communication skills real time. The proposed design is inclusive of two phases. In phase one, variables which determine communication skills are identified. In relation to these variables, student communication data will be collected for a period of a semester. The data collection will occur via Zoom sessions, for a selected project-based learning (PBL) module. In phase two, a machine learning model will be created using the gathered data in phase 1, and the plugin will be implemented. The plugin will categorize the students' communication skills into 3 categories such as “weak”, “average” and “good”. The proposed plugin generates a comprehensive report on student's communication skills which could be downloaded at the end of each session. The expected accuracy rate of the plugin is 80%.

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Enhancing oral presentation skills of engineering students: Technology to the rescue with the Virtual-i Presenter (ViP) Abstract Engineering graduates are faced with solving increasingly interdisciplinary and complex technical problems in a competitive world that requires clear communication and presentation skills. To this effect, oral communication skills should be considered an integral part of an engineer’s formal education. Many engineering departments, however, are currently experiencing a growth in enrolments which is translating to larger classroom sizes. Unfortunately, this is impacting on the ability for students to acquire oral presentation skills because in-class oral presentations can take over limited lecture or lab time which is needed for other critical technical material. To tackle this problem and improve presentation skills, a program called Virtual-i Presenter (ViP) was created. ViP allows students to create, review, and evaluate oral presentations using a webcam and a PowerPoint presentation outside of lecture time and still receive peer and academic feedback. The program has NO video or audio editing capabilities and thus the presentation becomes closer to how live presentations are given. ViP features a system to evaluate presentations, enabling the presenter to receive both technical and presentation skills feedback from peers and lecturers. ViP was successfully tested in classes of 19 natural resources and 78 civil engineering students. Survey results showed that students repeated (practiced) their presentations 4 to 6 times on average before submitting their final one. This is significant because most other students within the department will do less than 3 oral presentations during their academic career. By students being able to “see and hear” themselves present, it made them aware of their oral skills or fallacies and motivated them to enhance presentation skills by practicing more. The survey also showed that student’s overall experience with ViP was positive. As commonly as a lecturer currently asks students to write a report, lecturers can now also assign an oral presentation using ViP. Segments of ViP presentations can be discussed in class to highlight good and poor presentation techniques. Since ViP oral presentations are saved in digital format, students can learn from previous years presentations. Live presentations can not and should not be substituted fully; however, ViP enables students to become better prepared for when they have a chance to give a live presentation. Introduction Current engineering graduates are faced with solving increasingly interdisciplinary and complex technical problems in a competitive world that requires clear communication and presentation skills. These skills are actively being sought by industry, as can be seen in most engineering job advertisements requiring prospective engineers to have good communication skills. Furthermore, recently updated professional guidelines, such as those provided by the Institute of Professional Engineers New Zealand (IPENZ) and the U.S. Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)1,2, consider these skills an integral part of an engineers formal education. Specifically, the ability to communicate effectively is a professional skill that all engineers should possess as presented in Criterion 3 of the 2003 revised ABET accreditation criteria1,2. Various approaches have been taken by universities to provide opportunities for students to improve written communication skills, but improving student oral presentation skills

Student communication ability is one of the fundamental abilities that must be had by students in doing mathematical activities. One of the ways to construct knowledge is through communication. It’s through awareness during the process of expressing ideas verbally. This research was conducted with the aim of describing mathematical communication skills of Mathematics college students in a peer assessment cooperative learning models developed by Permadi [14]. The research method was descriptive qualitative by analyzing video and unstructured interview transcripts during the application of the model. The Participant was 61 students consisting of 2 classes, which were 34 students from class A and 27 students from class B who took calculus courses in the short semester of the 2018/2019 academic year. Class A was divided into 13 groups of three students and class B was divided into 9 groups of students randomly. Four group taken randomly as samples were recorded using a video camera during the application of the model. The research showed that applying peer assessment cooperative learning models promoted students’ oral communication skills. The advantages are 1) getting a new mathematical vocabulary, 2) feeling free in expressing mathematical ideas logically and systematically. On the other hand, lack of student oral communication is constrained due to differences in terms of 1) experiences about content, 2) selection of mathematical vocabularies. Based on the questionnaire responses, 100% of students felt the meaning of the model in constructing knowledge about calculus, 88% of respondents said they had the opportunity to share the ideas, 88% of respondents said that it was easier to obtain learning experiences.

T his study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of using cognitive self- regulated strategies basedprogram to develop EFL oral communicative competence skills for student teachers. Participants of thestudy were sixty student teachers from Benha university faculty of Education and they were divided into control group and experimental group. Instruments of the study were an oral communicative competenceskills checklist determine the necessary oral communication skills for the student teachers and a pre-post oral communicative competencetest to determine the level of the student teachers' oral communicative competenceskills. After measuring its validity and reliability, the pre-oral communication skills test was administrated on both groups. Results showed no statistically significant differences between the two groups. While teaching the control group with regular ways, the researcher administrated the proposed CSRS-based program on the experimental group.Finally, post-oral communication test was administered on both groups. Results showed that experimental group performed better in the post- oral communicative competence test after the treatment.This showed that the treatment program has an effective impact on improving EFL student teachersʹ oral communicative competence skills. According to all of that, it could be concluded that using CSRS to develop EFL oral communicative competence skills for EFL student teachers is very effective.

Oral presentation skill is an asset for graduates. A graduate with good oral presentation skills has a better chance in career advancement and promotion rather than one who does not. Thus, it is vital for university students to have exposure to oral communication strategies for them to become good presenters. The purpose of this study was to identify the communication strategies used by undergraduate students while delivering oral presentations in an oral communication skills course. The strategies used were mapped against the grades they obtained for the course to gauge the strategies used by students who scored an A (good presenters) versus those who scored a B (average presenters). Presenting to an audience may generate anxiety and concern that the presentation might not be delivered effectively. Good presenters have found ways to overcome or cope with this concern. Thus, the Oral Communication Strategies Inventory (OCSI) developed by Nakatani (Mod Lang J 90:151–168, 2006) was used to access strategies that the students used for coping while delivering their oral presentations. The OCS inventory included eight categories of strategies for coping while speaking and seven categories of strategies for coping while listening. However, for the purpose of this paper, only speaking strategies were analyzed. The respondents were 100 engineering students enrolled in a communication skills course. Results of the data analysis revealed that the good presenters employed more oral communication strategies than the average presenters. The better students had more frequently used social affective, fluency-oriented, and nonverbal strategies for coping with speaking problems. The average students, on the other hand, do utilize social affective and nonverbal strategies but on a much lesser degree. The findings suggest that average presenters should be made aware of the mentioned skills and be accustomed to them in order to enhance their oral presentation skills. As such, introducing the oral communication strategies to the students could help them improve their oral communication delivery.

Effective communication among healthcare providers is the key to success in any healthcare system.  The importance of communication skills has long been established in the medical and nursing education.  Although such skills are taught in medical and nursing undergraduate curriculum around the world, but less attention is being paid towards the communication skills of healthcare personnel in Pakistan.  The primary focus of this study is to determine whether the communicative language teaching (CLT) technique had an effect on oral English communication skills of nursing students. This quasi-experimental study was conducted at undergraduate nursing students. Purposive sampling was employed. A pre-test, based on role-plays, was conducted on the baseline status of students followed by a sixteen-hour course.  The same role-play scenarios were given as a post-test. Participants were assessed through rubrics adapted using proficiency descriptor and Cambridge English assessment scale.  The Wilcoxon signed-rank test was employed to compare scores obtained from pre-test and post-test.  The result revealed that the Communication language teaching technique had a significant effect on the oral English communication skills of nursing students.  The study suggested that activities conducted within the classroom should have a greater impact and involve real life communication in order to facilitate learning and proficiency in oral communication skills of students.

At present, oral communication and presentation skills are important components of accounting education. Students can improve their oral presentation skills when they know the expectations for effective presentations, give multiple group and individual presentations, and experience consistent instructor feedback. The authors use a case study methodology to describe a systematic approach to embed team and individual presentations in undergraduate and graduate accounting courses, include presentation competency descriptors, present an oral presentation assessment rubric with selected outcomes, and conclude with a discussion of the observed strengths and weaknesses of the case study.

Senior engineering students are required to practice oral communication skills during their studies in preparation for their professional practice. However, most technical courses dedicate their time to engineering knowledge rather than oral (or other) communication skills. The paper presents a method with specific materials and rubrics to help students improve their oral communication skills in a technical course. The method prepares students for the final presentation in the Capstone Design course, evaluated by faculty and practicing engineers. Results show that most students attain good and excellent performance in their final oral presentation, demonstrating student’s ability to communicate effectively with practitioner engineers.

High levels of anxiety during oral presentation and public speaking, can take two forms: facilitating anxiety, which drives preparation efforts, and debilitating anxiety, which hinders performance. Proficiency in oral communication is recognized as vital for ESL learners in both academic and professional contexts, with extensive research on public speaking and strategies to manage speech-related anxiety. In engineering education, effective communication skills are essential, aligning with industry expectations and the demands of professional engineering work, making oral presentations a fundamental component of assessment and curriculum development. Oral presentations are a significant component of the assessment process in engineering education, with various forms of assessments and varying levels of emphasis on oral communication skills among universities. Limited training in oral presentation skills is provided to engineering students, leading to challenges in assessment and feedback, and time constraints often favor written assessments. Peer assessment can enhance students' critical skills and reduce speaking anxiety, but ensuring the reliability of peer assessments remains a concern in engineering education. Anxiety associated with oral presentations is a common challenge among students, and it can be categorized into different types, including state anxiety, trait anxiety, and situation-specific anxiety, which can impact performance in educational and professional settings. Educators can assist students in developing an awareness of employing communication techniques to enhance their competence and self-assurance when delivering technical oral presentations. A framework known as the Oral Presentation-Multimodal Competence (OP-MM Competence) Framework is introduced, providing a structured approach for understanding and evaluating the essential components contributing to successful oral presentations.

This study aims to analyse the difference between academician and practitioner perception about deductive analysis skill, critical thinking skill, solving unstructured problem skill, investigation flexibility skill, analytical skill, oral communication skill, written communication skill, knowledge of the law skill, and tranquillity skill that were parts of relevant skills of forensic accountant. The object study was academicians and practitioners in Jakarta City. This study was empirical in nature and use purposive sampling method in data collection. Data was obtained by distributing 255 questionnaires in University and Public Accountant Firm in Jakarta. Seventy seven respondents (77%) that consist of 97 academicians and 100 practitioners give their responses. Data was analysed by Independent Sample Test by SPSS version 22.00 software package. The result of the hypothesis testing on the deductive analysis skill, critical thinking skill, investigation flexibility skill, analytical skill, and knowledge of the law skill shows that there is no significant difference in the perception between academicians with practitioners. The result of the hypothesis testing on the solving unstructured problem, oral communication, written communication, and tranquillity skill shows that there is a significant different on the perception between academician with practitioner.