The Practice
The School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine (CMM) uses individual and group oral presentations for continuous and summative assessment throughout the CMM and Biomedical Sciences (BMS) programmes. For many first-year undergraduate students, oral presentations in Year 1 are the first time they have encountered this form of assessment. Consequently, there can be substantial stress and anxiety associated with these presentations, particularly for some groups, e.g., international students, and those with specific learning or mental health challenges.
The project aims were to produce approachable and inclusive support resources by engaging with student partners. The expectation was that this approach would help make these resources more relatable than if a staff member had created them (and hopefully therefore easier to engage with). The resources were to be designed to be accessible to all, embedded and sustainable, benefitting the students throughout their degree programme, as well as future student cohorts.
Another aim of these resources was to make oral presentations more inclusive by considering the diversity of our student population and embedding good practice into presentation design from an early stage, including content accessibility (e.g. font size, figure annotation/labelling, colour scheme, etc.).
The intended outputs of the project were:
For students:
- An animated video on how to plan and deliver a successful scientific talk (including planning, content, structure, delivery, approach to questioning, overcoming anxiety, reassurance, and personal experiences). Additional emphasis was to be placed on ‘best practice’ in designing inclusive presentations that consider the diversity of learners in our student community e.g. students where English is their second language, students with red-green colour blindness, neurodiversity, etc. This output was created by our student partners.
- Video recording of an authentic, role-played 1st-year oral presentation (including an 8-minute tutorial talk with a question-and-answer session), to reflect what our students would expect to see during one of our tutorial sessions. This output was created thanks to a student volunteer agreeing to have a presentation they prepared for the Normal and Tumour Cells (NTC) unit recorded.
For staff:
- Infographic on giving consistent and effective feedback to maximise student development (including example feedback that students find helpful and unhelpful). This output was created by our student partners.
Findings
Overall, within the first few weeks of roll out, the student-focused resources from this project appear to have been well received by both students and staff and improved the student experience in the unit they were created for.
The Impact
At the time of writing, it was too early in the academic year to collect specific, formal feedback on the tutorials following the introduction of the new resources. However, informal in-session feedback from students who engaged with the resources was positive, with the formal mid-unit survey responses including comments such as:
“I enjoyed making and showing a presentation” and “The presentation assignment was very fun to finish”.
This compares positively to the student feedback from the mid-unit survey responses from the previous year, which included comments such as:
“I feel like I would need more guidance/support with our presentations. I was in the first round of people to present in Week 4 and I got really anxious…”
Feedback from staff was also positive, with one senior academic involved with the NTC unit for many years saying:
“I was really impressed with the improvement in the NTC presentations…. The resources were clearly very helpful to the students, for whom this is the first presentation they give at university.”
It is early days, but the shift in student feedback and the positive acknowledgement from staff highlights the impact the resources are already beginning to have on the student experience. They are also contributing towards our goal of helping students reach their potential and lower associated stress and anxiety around oral presentations and have aligned well with the ‘Designed for all’ priority in the ‘University Assessment and Feedback Strategy 2022-30’.
Next Steps
The resources will remain embedded in the 1st year NTC unit going forward to support student tutorial presentation preparation, with interest being shown in adopting the resources in other units within the School where oral presentations are given.
In terms of future development, we will be looking to record more examples of tutorial presentations in an acknowledgement that there are multiple approaches to giving oral presentations, some of which resonate more with some than with others. This should hopefully give the students more confidence in developing their own style.
Contact
Please contact Dr Chris Williams, lecturer and senior tutor in the School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine for more information about the student-created resources and their deployment.
