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Enhancing Public Speaking Confidence, Skills, And Performance: An Experiment Of Service-Learning, D. Brian Mcnatt

Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Much of service-learning research has been characterized as anecdotal and testimonial with widespread calls for more empirical data to support the claimed benefits of this pedagogical tool. The present longitudinal experiment answered these calls by testing the effect of service-learning projects on several oral communication skills during a 4-month period, as well as some boundary conditions affecting this impact. The intervention consisted of involvement in 1 of 20 different team-developed service-learning projects compared to traditional research projects. This was hypothesized to boost management students' public speaking self-efficacy, lower anxiety, and improve public speaking mechanics competence along with actual public speaking …