Assessing Goal 4 Communication Skills for Psychology Across Audience, Purpose, and Context

Abstract

The challenge of teaching communication skills outlined in Goal 4 of the APA Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major is that it occurs in many contexts and the communicator must adapt the form to match both context and purpose. We created a taxonomy of dimensions and kinds of communication that represents the various contexts in communication assignments in psychology classes. We propose a curricular-level solution to assessing the development of communication skill, including multiple assessment opportunities in both course and curriculum with progressively higher standards. We discuss how different forms of rubrics can be used to assess communication and created a “common” rubric that can be adapted and used to assess communication across many different contexts. Finally, since social media have increased the frequency of exposure to often engaging, but misleading or inaccurate communication, we discuss the value of being able to judge the validity of received communications and the importance of teaching students how to evaluate messages critically.

Do graduate students aim to teach undergraduates employable skills?

“…Graduate students reported teaching communication and analytical inquiry skills in undergraduate courses to a greater extent than professional development or collaboration skills, and placed more emphasis on professional development than on collaboration. Pedagogical emphasis on writing, speaking, and reading aligns with the Common Core State Standards that aim to prepare high school students for college and career readiness (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010; U.S. Department of Labor, 1991) and with previous reports that instructors focus on teaching communication skills across various contexts (Chew et al, 2020). Similarly, teaching analytical inquiry seems to align with efforts to promote critical thinking as a component of STEM education (Holmes et al, 2015) as emphasized in Common Core (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010).…”

Do graduate students aim to teach broad-based “employable” skills in online courses?

“…They also tended to emphasize professional development more than collaboration skills. The domains of communication (e.g., reading, writing) and analytical inquiry (e.g., scientific literacy, critical thinking) overlap considerably with academic competencies traditionally emphasized in K–12 (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2023) and higher education contexts (Becker-Blease et al, 2021; Chew et al, 2020; Holmes et al, 2015). In contrast, the development of collaboration and professional development skills may be viewed by many instructors as falling outside of their teaching responsibilities.…”

Writing across the curriculum: A longitudinal assessment of psychology majors’ writing development.

“…We tailored the rubric to fit the content and requirements of the research synthesis assignment and ended up with seven rubric criteria: accuracy, relevance, reasoning and logic building, organization, spelling and grammar, APA style of citations, and number of sources used (see Table 1). Our rubric included many elements common to writing rubrics used to evaluate research reports, including the evaluation of content, organization, writing mechanics, and APA style (Chew et al, 2020). Possible scores for each element ranged from one to five, except for the number of sources used, which ranged from 0 to 6.…”

“…Because we did not compare psychology majors to other students or nonstudents, it is still unclear whether the writing gains observed were due to content from our psychology curriculum or whether these gains were due to content learned from other courses or writing skill development that would have occurred naturally over time. It is rare for academic assessments to include control groups; in fact, in several recent articles making recommendations about conducting assessments in psychology, there is no mention of including comparison groups (e.g., Chew et al, 2020;Dunn et al, 2018Dunn et al, , 2020. Typically, one-group pretest-posttest designs are viewed as quality assessments in academia.…”

“…Goal 4.1 in the APA Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major requires students to communicate complex ideas and findings accurately, coherently, and effectively in written format for a variety of purposes. Being able to master the other four APA learning goals also partly depends on students' abilities to write effectively (Chew et al, 2020). In addition, the APA has highlighted written communication as a key transferable skill that psychology students bring into the workplace (Naufel et al, 2018).…”