Oral Communication Toolkit

Assessment in practice

Students value what their teachers assess. If you assess students’ oral communication skills, then they need plenty of practice in class. Some suggestions for assessing oral communication skills:

• Negotiate the assessment criteria with students – ask them what makes an effective oral presentation; what they look for themselves in a presentation; ask them to nominate an effective speaker with whom they are familiar (e.g., from politics, the media) and then analyse what it is that they do so well; choose some of these features to build into the assessment criteria;
• Specify particular weightings for the various criteria if appropriate; make sure students know that their delivery style will be assessed as well as their material and ideas;
• Give students opportunities to have their practice presentations critiqued within the class; use videos as a basis for constructive criticism, from the group, you as teacher, and the individual presenter; the practice presentations need only be a few minutes long;
• Use peer assessment – ask students to use the negotiated criteria to evaluate the presentations on a number of different dimensions; as teacher, reserve the right to moderate the student’s final grade;
• Include the question and answer section of the oral presentation in the assessment;
• Break large classes into smaller groups, each running peer assessment sessions concurrently; enlist tutors or Casual Academic staff to supervise each session; and
• Don’t overdo the number of oral presentations students give – one or two at the most during the course is fine, if the feedback is constructive.

Some relevant material can be found at:

Assessing Oral Presentations and Group Work.
Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 24 October, 2006.
http://www.hip.humanities.soton.ac.uk/staff/Learning--Assessment/Assessment-Resources/Assessing-Oral-Presentations-and-Group-Work.asp

Assessment Criteria Checklist – Oral Presentations: Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 24 October, 2006.
http://www.city.londonmet.ac.uk/deliberations/seda-pubs/Donaldson.html