Oral Communication Toolkit

Assessing presentations

Being able to speak convincingly and authoritatively is a useful career skill for students. One of the best ways to help them develop such skills is to involve them in giving assessed presentations. The following suggestions may help your students get the most from such activities:

• Be clear about the purposes of student presentations. For example, the main purpose could be to develop students' skills at giving presentations, or it could be to cause them to do research and reading to improve their subject knowledge. Usually, several such factors are involved together.
• Make the criteria for assessment of presentations clear from the outset. Students will not then be working in a vacuum and will know what is expected of them
• Get students involved in the assessment criteria. This can be done by allowing them to negotiate the criteria themselves, or by giving them plenty of opportunities to interrogate criteria you share with them.
• Ensure that students understand the weighting of the criteria. Help them to know whether the most important aspects of their presentations are to do with the way they deliver their contributions (voice, clarity of expression, articulation, body language, use of audio-visual aids and so on), or the content of their presentations (evidence of research, originality of ideas, effectiveness of argument, ability to answer questions, etc.).
• Give students some prior practice at assessing presentations. It is useful, for example, to give students a dry run at applying the assessment criteria they have devised in one or two presentations on video. The discussion that this produces usually helps to clarify or improve the assessment criteria.
• Involve students in the assessment of their presentations. When given the chance to assess one another’s presentations, students take them more seriously and will learn from the experience. Students merely watching one anothers’ presentations can get bored and switch off mentally. If they are evaluating each presentation using an agreed set of criteria, they tend to engage themselves more fully in the process, and in doing so, learn more from the content of each presentation.
• Ensure that assessment criteria span presentation processes and the content of the presentations sensibly. It can be worth reserving some marks for students’ abilities to handle questions after their presentations.
• Make up grids using criteria that have been agreed. Allocate each criterion a weighting, and try getting all members of the group to fill in the grids for each presentation. The average peer-assessment mark is likely to be at least as good an estimate of the relative worth of each presentation as would be the view of a single tutor doing the assessment.
• Be realistic about what can be achieved. It is not possible to get 12 five-minute presentations into an hour, and presentations always tend to over-run. It is also difficult to get students to concentrate for more than an hour or two on others’ presentations. Where classes are large, consider breaking the audience into groups, for example dividing a class of 100 into four groups, with students presenting concurrently in different rooms, or at different timetabled slots.
• Think about the venue. Students do not always give of their best in large, echoing, tiered lecture theatres. A more intimate, flat classroom is less threatening particularly for inexperienced presenters.
• Consider using videotapes. This can allow the presenters themselves the opportunity to review their performances, and can allow you to assess presentations at a time most suitable to you. Viewing a selection of recorded presentations from earlier rounds can be useful for establishing assessment criteria with students. This evidence of teaching and learning is also useful to show external examiners and external reviewers.
• Start small. Mini-presentations of a few minutes can be almost as valuable as 20-minute presentations for learning the ropes, especially as introductions to the task of standing up and addressing the peer-group.
• Check what other presentations students may be doing. Sometimes it can seem that everyone is including presentations in their courses. If students find themselves giving three or four within a month or two, it can be very demanding on their time, and repetitious regarding the processes.

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

[ top ]