Developing and assessing undergraduate research presentation skills: A case study in an environmental science program

The Global Environmental Science (GES) BS program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, a public research-intensive institution, requires a research thesis and a public research presentation. The GES program has a higher percentage of graduates from underrepresented groups when compared to the national geoscience programs. In this presentation, we describe (1) the curricular and co-curricular strategies used to scaffold the development of students research presentation skills, (2) the co-curricular assessment procedure, and (3) the measured impact on students presentation skills. The curricular support for students presentation skill development includes two required core courses that emphasize presentation skill development. The co-curricular support features 1) extensive faculty feedback on the students practice research presentation, and 2) a live formal presentation opportunity at the public GES Research Symposium followed by a Q&A session. To assess research presentation skills, one or two independent faculty experts used a presentation rubric to score each students practice and final presentation at the GES Symposium. This study includes these assessment results of 78 GES students that graduated between Spring 2015 and Spring 2021. The assessment results demonstrated the programs structured support for improving oral presentation skills was effective -- 95% of the participants scored at the satisfactory or higher level on all rubric dimensions on the final presentations. The practice session with accompanying expert feedback shows substantial positive impact, evidenced by the significantly improved scores on the final presentations in comparison with the practice presentation scores. While all groups of participants achieved high scores, and all groups improved their scores from practice to final presentation, the final scores of females were significantly higher than the male participants and Caucasian and Asian students had higher final scores than ethnically underrepresented groups. Our next steps include determining why these aforementioned differences in degree of improvement exist and how the program can best address them.