Extended abstract: Effectively teaching presentations to large numbers of engineering and science students

Abstract

Much research has gone into developing different strategies for teaching writing and speaking to engineering and science students. However, many of these strategies are designed for semester-long courses, in which a communication expert teaches fewer than 30 students. This extended abstract describes a study in which we test a different strategy for effectively teaching presentations to large numbers of engineering and science students in a relatively short time. Because the strategy calls for students to use the assertion-evidence approach, as opposed to the common topic-subtopic practice, the strategy is challenging. In our study, we are testing the strategy in four large student populations in workshops ranging from two days to one week.