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Incorporating Public Speaking into a Senior-Level Engineering Course—Steven Schrock

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Background

I teach CE 582 (Highway Engineering), a senior-level course that prepares students for professional careers in transportation engineering. As a final project, I ask students to work in groups to propose a project design for a real-life engineering problem. They then must present their design to a board of professional engineers. My teaching goal was to improve students’ visual and oral presentation skills, without sacrificing class time I typically devote to learning engineering fundamentals. | Implementation

Implementation

To improve presentation skills, I made small changes to existing assignments and lectures that provided students with an opportunity to practice their own presentation skills, as well as critique different levels of performance by other students. Other minor amendments to the course included surveying the class to assess their comfort level regarding public speaking, conducting a class discussion focused on a humorous video about science presentations, giving students extra credit opportunities that involved assessing seminar speakers, and creating a rubric for students that described traits of excellent performance. | Student Performance

Student Performance

I saw marked improvement in my students’ presentation skills, particularly in their visual representations (i.e. PowerPoint slides). However, although students identified aspects of weak public speaking performance in the video I showed in class, student reviews of seminar speakers lacked in-depth critiques of public speaking skills. | Reflections

I was pleased to see that even small changes to existing assignments and lectures could generate significant improvement in student presentation skills. I felt that I was able to increase student awareness regarding the importance of public presentation skills to professional engineering without sacrificing time I typically devote to teaching engineering fundamentals.

| Summary

Project Summary

Small changes to existing assignments and minor amendments to a civil engineering course result in significant improvement in students’ presentation skills.

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