Understanding growth and development in undergraduate students’ thinking, writing and speaking skills

Abstract

The previous volume of AJSoTL introduced the work of various colleagues on developing writing skills. This volume extends the conversation with an additional slate of three articles, each addressing a different aspect of communication and critical thinking skills. As observed in these papers, the task of measuring communication skills growth is a challenge, though it is important to investigate and gather evidence of the effectiveness of curricular initiatives on these skills. In the spirit of SoTL, these papers demonstrate systematic investigations for the gathering of evidence through qualitative inquiry of students’ perception of skills growth or through the adaptation of existing framework to measure critical thinking skills. Meeting the challenge of measuring communication skills development is more successful in some cases than in others. However, it is still important to emphasise the need for investigating the teaching and learning of communication skills in a scholarly manner and disseminating the outcomes for peer review. Trigwell (2013) has assessed if such SoTL efforts achieved its purpose of improving students’ experience of learning and concludes that the chance of improving students’ learning experience is higher when teaching is scholarly in approach and inquiry into the relevant processes is peer reviewed and disseminated.