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Impact of microteaching on engineering students' communication skills

Abstract:

In current educational processes, it is common to find that students make use of oral presentations with the purpose of exposing a specific topic within the contents of a subject. These types of presentations are also intended for students to learn or improve oral presentation techniques, which generally enrich their communication skills. However, these activities are usually carried out without prior preparation or without well-defined terms of reference, obtaining different results, even within homogeneous groups of students. The objective of the paper is focused on determining the effect of microteaching on engineering students' oral presentation techniques and improve communications skills. To measure its impact, three courses of different levels of the civil engineering career were selected (152 students), separating in each of them two groups of students. Each group of students has been asked to prepare different oral presentations. The first group of students prepared the presentation in a traditional way, while, the second group of students prepared the presentation as if it were a microteaching session. The oral presentations of the groups were evaluated, finding that the microteaching has a favorable impact on the improvement of the communications skills of the students.