Abstract:

Oral presentations are commonly used in higher education to assess students’ communication skills. Oral presentations usually have temporary restrictions, so that students have a maximum time for their presentations. Timekeeping is important to ensure that all students have the same opportunities for the teaching activity. In general, in the context of a classroom, the teacher is the person who plays the role of moderator, alerting the students when time runs out. However, these time limits are frequently exceeded by students, who only deals with time when teacher intervenes. The use of timers can help adjust the time throughout the presentation. There are different timekeeping devices that can help control the time. The goal of this paper is to study the impact on students' timekeeping skills of the kind of device used and the possible differences between them. The hypothesis of this study is that the use of a timekeeping device influences students’ time to conform to the expected duration of the oral presentation, and that not all device types influence the same way.

The experiment has been conducted in the Information Architecture on the Web subject of the Information and Documentation Degree at the Universitat de València (Spain) during the last 3 years. This subject is taught during the second course of the degree and has an average enrollment of 25 students.

During the course, students are required to perform an oral presentation of a work group activity. Groups consists of three or four students (depending on the number of enrolled students) and they have 10 minutes to make the presentation. To perform the experiment, each group was randomly provided with a different timekeeping device just before beginning the oral presentation. Two different timekeeping devices and a control group were used:
1) “built-in timer”: a built-in timer on a presentation remote control that vibrates when time is coming to end.
2) “timer app”: a timer app on a screen that displays the spent time.
3) “control group”: some of the groups did not receive any timekeeper device in order to serve as a control group.
In no case teacher warned students about the time. At the end of the oral presentation, duration was registered. Response variable analyzed in the experiment was time spent during oral presentation. For comparison purposes, we studied three different parameters regarding three academic courses from 2016/2017 to 2018/2019.

Experimental results show that, although there was no significant impact on timing adjustment when timekeeping devices were used, the technique that produces the best time adjustment was technique (1) “built-in timer” with minor differences comparing with technique (2) “timer app”. Moreover, results also show that groups without timekeeping devices presented higher variability in presentation duration. Two drawbacks founded during experiments should be noted. First, when technique:
(1) “built-in timer” is used, only the person carrying the device is aware of the vibration, while the rest of the members are unaware of the alert. Second, technique
(2) "timer app" caused some students nervousness, so that they decided to ignore it.

In conclusion, timekeeping devices can be useful for adjusting to time in oral presentations. Although there are no significant differences between each kind of device, each one could be more appropriate for a different subject profile.

Keywords:

Oral presentation, timekeeping device, higher education.