TRAINING, PRACTICE, AND ASSESSMENT OF STUDENT'S PUBLIC SPEAKING COMPETENCE IN THE GENERAL HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY MASTER

Introduction:
The studies of the future General health Psychologists (GHP) must comprise two types of competences in terms of European Higher Education Area (EHEA): 1) general competences as professionals in a changing labor context, and 2) specific competences from the Psychologist's professional profile. In this sense, the public speaking forms part of the "Oral and written communication in your own language" competence, one of the most important generic competence in the new EHEA Studies. Furthermore, it is also considered an specific competence in health professions.
Despite the high probability to use this competence in different contexts, it has been proven that this competence generates high stress in students and could be, in some cases, an important academic and employability limitation. The public speaking fear, and the lack of knowledge/training about how to do a speech are the major barriers in order to do it correctly.

Goals:
Through this project we would like to achieve the following goals: 1) To enhance theoretical and practice knowledge about the public speaking competence in the GHP Master' s students, and 2) To enhance the self-efficacy and confidence levels in the GHP Master's students on this specific competence.

Method:
We are conducting a pilot study with 30 students, 7 man and 23 women, from the GHP Master at the University of Zaragoza. First, we will conduct a pre-test assessment about public speaking self-efficacy (Public Speaking Self-efficacy Questionnaire; Herrero et al., 2007) and about the public speaking confidence (Public Speaking Confidence Questionnaire; Méndez et al. 1999). Second, we will organize two workshops:
1) oral communication skills and technical voice practice, and
2) how to structure and deliver speeches.

Third, students will start training in different subjects of the GHP Master and the professors will assess the speeches through the ECO Scale (Roso-Bas, Pades, & Ferrer, 2013). This scale assess from 1 to 5 points the following variables: facial expression, bodily expression, eye contact, fluency, volume, intonation, and speech content. After the training period we will assess again all students with the same pre-test questionnaires (post-test) and we will compare the means obtained in the two assessment periods (Student's t-test, p<.05). We will also present a progression chart with the ECO Scale scores.

Results:
We hope that the knowledge improvement about how to speak in public contexts combined with the training in different subjects (different contents and professors), it will influence, in a statistically significant manner, the enhancement of the self-efficacy and confidence scores to speak in public contexts. We also hope that the training will improve the ECO Scale scores over time.

Conclusions:
In higher education studies, the time spend for developing practical competences (know-how), as in the case of public speaking competence, is comparatively lower than the time spend for developing theoretical knowledge (know-what). The public speaking is a core competence for the professional development of the future GHP and because of that we should ensure its training over the GHP Master studies. We consider that the methodology described in this project could allow positive and objective results because of the specific measures administered and the systematic professor's observation.