Student seminar program for improving academic presentation skills for PhD students in science: The effect of language background on outcome

The study aims to reveal how the students improved their academic presentation skills and the limitations to improvement with or without influences of students’ language backgrounds. Since the career paths of postgraduates have become more diverse in recent years, generic skills training is increasingly included in postgraduate programmes in addition to specific research training. However, PhD education generally adopts a traditional style, often relying on an individual supervisor without the inclusion of specific programmes to improve students’ generic skills. As academic presentation skills are crucial to research and are a generic skill that PhD students in science must acquire, we propose that existing student seminar programmes can be used effectively as an active training programme to improve these skills.

To design effective student seminars, we investigated how PhD students improved their academic presentation skills when opportunities to give regular seminars were provided and students were given detailed scores that measured performance in specific areas of presentation competency. We outline an extensive case study of 95 PhD students who presented at student seminars over a period of six years (2006-2011). Valid data of 73 students were collected, and data of 58 students were used for detailed analysis. Performance in three major factors important to presentation skills: structure, visuals and delivery, were scored for each seminar, and the scores underwent detailed statistical analysis.

Our key findings are that international students obtained better scores than Australian students for their first presentations while Australian students obtained a better score than international in for their second and the later presentations. The improvement of international students is slower than Australian students but occurs at a steadier pace. International students showed difficulty in improving answering questions.

This is the first time that a longitudinal study on PhD students’ development of academic presentation skills has been undertaken. Our results revealed how the students improved academic presentation skills and that the limitations to improvement depended on their language backgrounds. We discuss our findings from the viewpoint of student language backgrounds and the process of adaptation to academic culture.