Abstract:

"Effective Oral Communication” is one of the student outcomes to which more attention is given within the university studies, both in Bachelor's and Master's degrees. This is because it is one of the most demanded in the workplace, since good communication is essential for the development of any job. Therefore, it is important to develop the outcome at all the learning levels, reason why university syllabuses contemplate it. In this context, as important as assessing the proficiency level at the end of a certain subject to certify it, it is providing activities to develop it and evaluating how the followed methodology contributes to this development. To reach this goal, the ComunicaT methodology was created in 2017. This methodology has been developed within a Project of Innovation and Educational Improvement (PIME) at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, and has as its fundamental objective that the student, after performing a self-diagnosis, can improve their effective oral communication through a self-learning itinerary. In this way, the student, starting from his level of initial proficiency in terms of effective oral communication, follows a self-formative itinerary particularized to his specific situation, with the appropriate training activities. The methodology has been designed and developed by teachers of different profiles, degrees and universities. Since its origin, it has been tested with different groups of students of the Universitat Politècnica de València and Universitat de València (Spain). After two academic years of implementation, the goal of this work is to analyse the degree of contribution of this methodology to development of the "Effective Oral Communication” students outcome of students that followed the methodology during the subject Audits of Food Safety and Quality Systems, belonging to the Master in Food Safety and Quality Management. To this end, at the beginning of the subject, students were asked to present a topic related to the subject and evaluated with respect to the six areas in which the project has defined the development of the outcome following a rubric. Then the methodology was presented, and at the end of the teaching period the procedure was repeated. Finally, marks obtained before and after the learning intervention were compared. Results showed that the methodology contributed in a great extent to improve the ordering of ideas in the presentation, the non-verbal communication and the design of the slides. Therefore, although there are fields where the methodology contributed to a lower percentage, it can be concluded that the methodology is very effective in improving effective oral communication student outcome.

Keywords:

Effective oral communication, self-learning methodology, learning impact.