Final Written Report Form for Learning Outcomes Assessment Grants 2010
(Submit by Monday, May 30, 2011 to the Director of Assessment)
Instruction: Please type your answers in the respective text areas.
Part A: General Information
Date:
May 16, 2011
Across Two Basic Courses
Primary investigator:
boyd@purdue.edu
Program and college or unit:
Project Title:
Melanie Morgan & Josh Boyd
Communication Assessment Project
Email: morgan3@purdue.edu;
Communication Liberal Arts
Other directly involved collaborators and their programs and colleges/units:
Part B: Description of the Assessment Project
1) Which learning outcome(s) of your college or unit did this assessment project focus on?
Communication: Students will be able to communicate--both orally and in writing--with clarity and precision.
Information literacy: Students will be able to demonstrate competence in information literacy.
2) What was the purpose of your assessment project? That is, what did you wish to find out about student
learning? As you began, what did you actually expected to find?
The assessment project primarily evaluates students’ ability to create clear and precise messages. Students will
also provide affective data on their perceived level of anxiety related to oral communication, and their
information literacy skills will also be assessed (both at the beginning and at the end of the semester). Specifics
regarding the implementation of the assessment protocol are detailed for each course separately.
COM 114
Five sections will be chosen at random for participation in the assessment. A total of 140 students (5 sections @
28 students) will participate in the assessment from COM 114. Students will deliver a two-minute impromptu
presentation during the second week of class which will be video recorded and assessed by a trained coder.
Students will also complete the Personal Report of Communication Anxiety (PRCA) which measures anxiety
related to oral communication. Additionally, students will also be asked to complete an information literacy
measure. All of these procedures will be replicated during the last week of November, thereby providing preand post-test measures of speaking performance, a self-assessed anxiety measure and an informational literacy
component.
COM 217
Two sections of COM 217 will be chosen at random for a participation in the assessment. This selection will
result in a total of 40 student participants. The procedure in COM 217 will be identical to the one for COM 114
with one exception: a writing component will be added to the procedure. During the second week of class
students will be asked to summarize a scientific article. As in COM 114, they will also be asked to deliver a twominute impromptu presentation, complete the PRCA, and complete a literacy measure. The speaking and writing
samples will be coded by a trained coder and the process will be repeated during the last week in November.
We hoped to see some difference in performance along the following variables during the course of the
semester: impromptu speaking, speech anxiety, information literacy, and for the science students improvement
in synthesizing an article.
3) What activities comprised this assessment project? That is, what did you do in order to investigate your
hypothesis? If you could do it over, what would you change or not do?
For COM 114 activities included: pre and post test speeches, pre and post test measures on the PRSA and the
information self-efficacy scale.
For COM 217 activities included: pre and post test speeches, pre and post test measures on the PRSA ,the
information self-efficacy scale and a pre and post test writing synthesis task.
One thing we would alter in this assessment is the weight of the assignments in relation to the final grades of
students. The tasks associated with this assessment accounted for a very small portion of the student’s grade.
In many cases, the students were not motivated to perform well because there was relatively nothing at stake
for them in the process. In addition, many students failed to complete all aspects of the assessment.
(continued on next page)
(#3 continued)
4) What did you actually find out about student learning? What data support your conclusion?
See the attached pages for a brief description of the results.
5) What next? Based on what you found, what next steps or interventions to improve student learning do you
plan to take? When and where do you plan to do this?
Overall, we were pleased with the results from the PRCA. Anxiety is moving in the right direction and the
course is significantly decreasing communication anxiety levels. There was no change for anxiety related to
public speaking for the 217 students. Time two data collection was close to a major speaking assignment. So,
we do believe that anxiety related to the speaking activity could have biased the results. However, in 217 next
semester, more emphasis will be placed on reducing anxiety related to speaking through more in-class
impromptu speaking assignments.
We were pleased with the outcomes related to Information Literacy Self-Efficacy scores and no changes will be
made to the curriculum. However, we would like to use additional outcome or behavioral measures to further
investigate this area in the future. As many of these measures are proprietary and expensive, we do not have
plans to utilize any of them at the present time.
We were also pleased with outcomes of the speaking assessment. Students showed improvement in terms of
articulating an idea or argument orally. There was less rambling and students were able to effectively introduce
and conclude the oral presentation which is always difficult for students. We will continue to work on the use of
lay language in 217. We want to continue to build and strengthen these skills so we are going to incorporate
more in-class, graded impromptu speaking assignments in both courses.
We were also pleased in the outcomes related to the writing assessment in 217. We saw improvements in the
overall evaluation and inaccuracies in the summary report. Although grammar usage and the use of lay
language were not significant – they were moving in the right direction. We can definitely argue that there was
a trend for both of these variables. Avoiding scientific language is a difficult task for students to master. More
daily written assignments and peer feedback activities will be included this next semester to emphasize these
two skills.
Overall, we were pleased with the outcomes and believe that our curriculum is effective. There are places where
tweaks can be made to hone a few skills. The data will be particularly effective in helping us train new TAs and
to point returning TAs to important factors in building students skills. This has been a positive and rewarding
experience and will definitely help us improve the curriculum to enhance skills identified by the university as
important outcomes.
6) Appendix: Please attach publications and presentation abstracts resulting from this work. There are
no current publications or presentations associated with this project, but a paper based on
this work will be submitted to the Southern Communication Association this fall to be
presented in San Antonio.
I am the sole (or primary) collaborator on this project. My collaborators (if appropriate) and I are available at a
mutually acceptable time to present an oral report, with our findings and data, to the University community.
Signature of Investigator