Education Commons^™

A Narrative Inquiry Exploring How College Communication Professors Engage Students With Public Speaking Apprehensions, Derek Riedel

Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to discover how communication professors at four-year private universities help students who exhibit public speaking apprehension (PSA) learn to cope with their anxiety. The research was framed in the narrative inquiry paradigm, interviewing eight college communication professors about their experiences working with public speaking students. Each of the eight professors worked at private universities in a large southwest metropolitan city. The researcher attempted to gather critical incidents that shed light on valuable learning experiences that could be useful to professors looking for ways to help reduce their students' PSA. The researcher found three …

Efficacy Of A Basic Public Speaking Course Delivered Via A Virtual Community College, Stephen Bradley Bailey

Dissertations

The purposes of this study were to: (a) determine if taking the basic public speaking course in face-to-face, hybrid, and online format statistically significantly reduces public speaking anxiety; (b) determine which course format, if any, reduces public speaking anxiety to the greatest extent; (c) determine if students’ satisfaction with learning is statistically significantly different in the three course formats; (d) determine faculty’s perceptions of students learning in the basic public speaking in the three course formats.

Pre- and post-data were collected from 263 participants taking the basic public speaking course in a virtual community college in January 2012 and in …