Effects Of Practice And Formal Feedback On Students' Oral And Written Communication On A Healthcare Profession Undergraduate Track Cohort
Authors: Fortepiani Lourdes Alarcon , Foutch Brian K 
Published: June 2021

Communication is critical in Healthcare professions. However; based on a survey of our Optometry School's faculty, student writing assessments are rare. Oral presentations are more regularly assigned but still not common. Our graduates will ultimately find themselves providing healthcare or regularly communicating with those who do, so our lack of emphasis on developing thoughtful expression is unfortunate. Here we report the effects of practice and formal feedback on health science students' reflective expression and overall performance in both written and oral formats.

Seventeen vision science undergraduate students (enrolled in either an integrated ocular science or epidemiology/public health course) completed four 100–150‐word essays based on readings or resources related to topics being covered in each course. The first and fourth of these assignments were both written and short oral (2–5 min) presentations and occurred early in and near the end of the semester, respectively. There were two “midterm” written assignments unaccompanied by oral presentations. The goal of this design from an educational perspective was to provide practice in expression as well as to provide formal feedback to students. From a research perspective, we observed whether student performance improved either on written or oral presentation assignments with only repeated written assignments.

Up to six instructors graded all written essays on structure and reflection, assigning structure grades based on the readability and information contained in the essays. Reflection was graded by assigning a number (in half‐step increments) from 1 to 4 based on the level of reflection (habitual, reporting, reflective, or critically reflective) in the writing. The oral presentations were only graded by the two course coordinators. A descriptive analysis of all outcomes was performed as well as an analysis of the change in grades between the first and final assignments to determine whether practice improved performance.

Written percentage scores (mean ± S.E.) increased from 76.0 ± 1.7 to 78.5 ± 1.7 over the semester, but the improvement was not statistically significant (t[16] = 0.856, p = 0.41). There was however a positive trend in oral presentation scores, as they increased from 73.9 ± 3.7 to 82.7 ± 2.7 (t[16] = 1.907, p = 0.075). The largest average improvement over the semester was in oral reflection component grades, but higher variability in oral reflection grades for both assignments (S.E. = 4.6 and 8.5, respectively) made statistical significance hard to achieve in the comparisons.

Our results suggest that there was an improvement over the semester in both written and oral presentation grades, but only the oral presentation grades approached significance. We do believe that improvements in reflection and overall written and presentation abilities can be made in health science students with intentional and critical feedback. However, any inferences in our study were limited by a series of factors such as small number of subjects, the short duration of the intervention limited to one semester, and the variability in grading by relatively novice graders.

This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.