Increasing Student Self-Efficacy: A Case for Assigning Oral Communication Activities before Written Assignments

Abstract

Because strong oral communication skills have well-known academic, social, and professional benefits, they are increasingly targeted and reinforced throughout general education programs in higher education. In these efforts, public speaking assignments most often ask students to discuss information they have previously written about (e.g., theses defenses, position statements, research papers). This article presents a reverse approach—using short oral presentations to prepare students for subsequent written assignments. Previous studies have found that students will more closely read and evaluate source materials when they must articulate the information orally for an audience. Integrating oral presentations in the writing process gives students practice with language and vocabulary, but maybe more importantly, it also has the potential to increase students’ self-efficacy—their confidence in their ability to understand and successfully complete additional research-related activities—which can, in turn, positively affect engagement and retention.

Keywords:

• higher education
• oral presentations
• self-efficacy
• skill reinforcement
• writing courses

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go to the Faculty Learning Community Project at my institution and to communications professor Kelly O’Bannon, who, during these workshop conversations, contributed to the design of the oral presentation assignment sequence described in this article.

Declaration of conflicting interest

The author declares no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data availability statement

The author confirms that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article.

Notes

1 . I recognize that my discussion might raise questions about translingualism and unjust grading practices (cf. Gevers, 2018; Matsuda, 2014; Young, 2010), but that discussion is beyond the scope of this article.

2 . This study complies with institutional requirements for research involving human subjects. All directly quoted student work is used with permission from the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.