Incorporating Oral Presentations into Electrical and Computer Engineering Design Courses: A Four-Course Study

One measure of continuous improvement in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE) at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte is survey feedback from alumni on their workplace readiness. In a recent survey, alumni highlighted oral communication as an area of weakness in the curriculum. When a group of faculty teaching design courses learned about the University’s Communication Across the Curriculum (CAC) program, they formed a pilot team to focus on improving student oral presentation skills in the design courses. The CAC program focuses on the oral and written communication as playing an integral role in teaching students reasoning, critical thinking, and problem solving skills. And as faculty development program, it seeks to develop a communication enhanced curriculum (CEC) at the departmental level. The CAC program hosts an annual institute during which departmental teams gain professional development in the areas of oral and written communication. At the 2010 CAC Institute, a team of ECE faculty set the strategic goal to improve ECE students’ ability to clearly convey technical information orally during design presentations. The ECE team then met with the CAC coordinator to develop an oral communication rubric for uniform implementation, thus establishing a cohesive assessment across the department’s design sequence. Our goal with this approach was to improve oral communication skills among our graduates to increase their opportunities for success in their professional careers. We focused on three important skills in oral presentation: audience analysis, message coherence / focus, and message delivery. A team of five faculty--four from ECE and the CAC director--worked together to develop a rubric to evaluate students oral presentation skills in the sophomore design (ECGR 2252), junior design (ECGR 3157) and senior design (ECGR3253 and ECGR3254) courses. The implementation of the process began by using the rubric in Appendix (a) to evaluate student and team presentations in each of the four courses above. We videotaped the presentations for students to review later so they could learn from their mistakes. We followed teams of students from the sophomore design in the spring 2012 to the Senior Design in the fall 2013, and we tracked and observed their progress from sophomore design to senior design. Our hope was that the results would justify full implementation into other ECE courses by the fall of 2014. This paper describes the process we followed to implement this emphasis on oral communication. This paper also presents a comparison of oral communication performance before and after the emphasis on oral communications was implemented. Data collected is from measurement tools put in place six years ago for ABET Student Outcome reporting. Introduction The Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department and the Communication Across the Curriculum (CAC) program worked together on a three-year research project to study the impact of instructors’ written feedback and students’ written reflections on electrical engineering students’ speaking skills. Four design courses—sophomore, junior, and two senior design P ge 24729.2 classes—provided the project’s framework. The research involved assessing the presentations of a select group of project students and an equal number of control group students, beginning with the sophomore design class and continuing through the two senior design courses. The project students received feedback via an analytic rubric. The benefits of using rubrics are shown in Conrad et al . The Project students viewed their videotaped presentations and wrote a reflective paper on their performances. The control group did not receive feedback, although their presentations were scored using the rubric. At the conclusion of the senior design class, a statistical analysis of the data was expected to support the project’s overall objective: that student’ speaking skills would improve with multiple opportunities for practice and feedback. The ECE department was invested in this project because communication skills are criteria by which the department is judged for accreditation. The university community stands to benefit from the knowledge created because our findings address oral communication goals stated in the 2008 UNC tomorrow report, a system-wide visioning document. This project has the potential to increase student engagement in the discipline, and we hope it will become a campus-wide model of how pedagogical revision can speak to the objectives of the Quality Enhancement Program that is part of the SACS assessment. The strategic goal of this project was to improve the oral communication skills of all undergraduate electrical engineering students. The research question was whether this strategic goal could be achieved via instructors’ post-performance feedback and students’ reflective writing. We investigated this question through a statistical comparison of the effectiveness of the oral presentations made by the project students with those made by a control group of students. The assessment data needed for this comparison was based mostly on the blind judgment of third-party evaluators in the second senior design class. Project research overview The objective of this joint research project was to test the hypothesis that students’ speaking skills would improve with multiple opportunities for practice, self-reflection, and instructor feedback. The methodology was to statistically compare the speaking effectiveness of a select group of project students with an equal number of control group students after all students were given multiple opportunities for practice. However, the presentations of only the project students were videotaped for their self-assessments, and only the project students received feedback from the instructors. Four curriculum-required designs courses—namely, sophomore, junior, and two senior design classes, provide the project’s framework. The project concluded in fall 2013, when third-party evaluators judged all student presentations in the Senior Design class oral presentation without knowing who the project students were. Project Narrative A. Specific Aims The overall purpose of this research was to improve the oral communication skills of approximately 350 undergraduate electrical engineering students by providing multiple opportunities for practice and feedback. The project’s objective was to determine whether or not the quality of students’ oral presentations improved after post-performance feedback and reflective writing. We determined this through a statistical comparison of the control group and the select group of project students. P ge 24729.3 The proposed project addressed the following research questions: a. Is the level of audience awareness and interaction (aai) higher for the project students than for the control group? b. Is the level of message coherence and focus (mcf) higher for the project students than for the control group? c. Is the level of message delivery effectiveness (mde) higher for the project student than for the control group? These questions generated the criteria by which we would evaluate the students’ oral presentations. Both the questions and the criteria were generated in a July 2011 meeting, during which, after much discussion, the faculty team determined that audience awareness and interaction, message coherence and focus, and message delivery effectiveness became priority criteria because students demonstrated weaknesses in these areas. The rationale for the project was partially driven by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology’s recent addition of communication standards for accrediting engineering programs (ABET 3). The current research on oral communication in electrical engineering has grown as a result of this development, along with the realization that oral presentations are frequently utilized in professional engineering practice. Hence, the ECE faculty has created programmatic student learning outcomes that address the need for students to practice communicating their ideas orally to both professional and lay audiences. To link the project to professional workplace readiness, the design faculty will continue the current practice of asking a panel of local engineers to evaluate the students’ final presentations in the second senior design class. To plan this project, the ECE design team and the CAC coordinator met twice during the summer of 2011 to develop a standardized analytic rubric for use during the study. We then tested the rubric during a senior design presentation in October 2011 and revised it to improve its usability. The impact goal of the proposed project was the creation of new pedagogy that is more effective in imparting oral communication skills to electrical engineering students in order to prepare graduates for oral presentations required for employability and professional advancement. The CAC program seeks to use the knowledge gained to assist other departments across campus who seek to improve their students’ oral communication skills. B. Literature Review Past and current research speaks to the need for a pedagogical shift in the general engineering curricula from a purely technical focus to one that integrates written and oral communication. Darling and Dannels, in “Practicing Engineers Talk about the Importance of Talk,” note that there has been a “disparity between the perceived importance of communication and the respective preparation students receive on communication related tasks” in engineering and the need to provide students with practice and preparation in speaking. Currently, scholars and teachers are working with engineering departments to respond to this disparity in a variety of theoretical, curricular, and pedagogical ways. Incorporating public speaking requirements into the curriculum and aligning oral communication assignments with workplace e