Abstract:

Oral communication is an important skill in the professional context of all areas. Whether it is coordinating teams, presenting projects or participating in meetings. It is empirically accepted among teachers that students who read and interpret well and communicate orally fluently and assertively achieve better academic results. Generally, these students are also more likely to hold more senior positions in their professional fields. Therefore, higher education has the challenge of developing oral communication skills as oriented as possible to the demands of the labor market. Furthermore, it is important to recognize that active learning is increasingly a fundamental pillar of the teaching-learning process in higher education. The teacher acts as a facilitator of the learning process, and the student is the protagonist and co-responsible for his own learning. Thus, assessment ceases to be an exclusive competence of the teacher and becomes also of the student himself: the student must assess his performance, both in relation to the knowledge construction process and in relation to the assessment of his competences and difficulties; the student should also know how to evaluate the performance of peers in relation to the desired standard (and informed by the teacher). This allows him/her to automatically reflect on him own performance in relation to that same standard.

This paper describes a pedagogical strategy, which aimed at self-evaluation and peer-evaluation of the production of individual oral discourses, previously oriented, in a context of job interview simulation. The strategy was implemented at the curricular unit of Oral and Written Expression Techniques, in the scope of three courses of the higher professional training course: SME Management, Information Systems Programming and Network and Computer Systems, taught at Águeda School of Technology and Management of the University of Aveiro (ESTGA-UA, Portugal). The students produced individual oral speeches, observed and assessed using three instruments: hetero-evaluation grid for peer assessment with different descriptors, previously built with the students' collaboration; analysis of the video recording of the presentation made in class and completion of an online self-assessment questionnaire, which aims to identify the main communicative difficulties and weaknesses of the student, in terms of non-verbal language, at the Prosody, Kinesics, and Proxemics levels.

After a brief literature review on the importance of oral communication in the academic and professional context and the (self)evaluation and peer review, as active learning strategies, next, we analyse the results of the questionnaire survey, applied to 91 first-year students of four higher professional technical courses at ESTGA-UA, in the first semester of the academic year 2022/2023.

Keywords:

Self-assessment, peer assessment, oral competence, higher education, skill, pedagogical strategy.