Assessment of oral presentation skills is an underexplored area. The study described here focuses on the agreement between professional assessment and self- and peer assessment of oral presentation skills and explores student perceptions about peer assessment. The study has the merit of paying attention to the inter-rater reliability of the…

Tested public speaking anxiety of university students at the beginning and end of the semester. Treated one group with skills training, visualization, and Communication-Orientation therapy; another received skills training and visualization; another received only skills training; fourth group served as control. Found that the 2 groups receiving…

Although feedback from teachers to students occupies a central role in learning and instruction, the manner in which feedback functions in performance improvement remains unclear. The current study examined how students' sensitivity to feedback and variations in the wording of feedback messages impacted public speaking performance. Results…

A two-stage study was designed to offer a comprehensive analysis of current basic public speaking textbooks. The first stage involved a comprehensive classification, enumeration, and comparison of the substance of six textbooks identified by publishers as leading competitors on the public speaking market. Results from the first stage formed the…

Reports on two do-it-yourself treatment programs for dealing with stage fright. One program followed a systematic desensitization paradigm; the other was a handout listing 16 strategies for understanding stage fright. Higher ratings were given to the handout strategy. A list of the 16 strategies is included. (Author/RC)