An Experience Report: Integrating Oral Communication and Public Speaking Training in a CS Capstone Course

Capstone or senior design courses are a key feature of most Computer Science programs as they provide students with authentic project experiences. Capstone courses usually focus on technical skill development, but we recognize that students will greatly benefit from developing communication skills. Within Computer Science, mastering such skills is essential for explaining and documenting system design, tackling development as a team, or leading large projects. Additionally, computer scientists need to be able to communicate their expertise to outside audiences such as funders, policymakers, customers, etc. However, studies have shown that students lack experience-based training to communicate functionally and practically. In this paper, we describe our experience with a targeted intervention within a capstone course in Computer Science. During the course, students complete a senior project while receiving training on team and project management, public speaking, and leadership. We evaluated the impact of the intervention on improving students' speaking skills and confidence by deploying surveys before and after the intervention. We observed a significant improvement in confidence and mastery of technical and non-technical oral communication skills. We also highlight how this training was particularly beneficial for underrepresented students within the discipline.


INTRODUCTION
Developing oral communication skills is important for undergraduate students.Within Computer Science, studies have shown that students benefit from having a communication component in their curriculum [10,12].Competence in this area is also a requirement in many programs.For example, the development of oral communication skills is one of the requirements for ABET accreditation for computing programs [9].Whether they choose a career in academia or join the industry, graduates need to effectively explain their expertise to succeed in the field, disseminate information to others, and maximize the impact of their research in the broader world [14,19]; However, previous assessments [2] have shown the oral communication skills of university graduates do not satisfy employers' expectations.
College students today exhibit higher rates of anxiety related to public speaking than previous generations [3,22].This fear is even more prevalent among women [17].In addition to suffering from anxiety, many of our students with minoritized identities (women, people of color, or first generation) battle issues of imposter syndrome and lack of confidence.Many students believe that they are not ready for technical oral communication.58% of surveyed participants in our study disagreed with the following statement: "I have received sufficient training related to public speaking or technical presentations." Overall, the students in our study rate their oral communication (general and technical) preparation an average of 2.1 out of 5. Figure 1 highlights that women generally feel less confident and underprepared to present at an academic conference, discuss their expertise in a job interview, provide an elevator pitch for a project, or introduce themselves and network efficiently.While oral communication skill development has always been a concern for tech students [8], the pandemic changed students' perspectives on communication.Due to the drastic decrease in inperson communication, many students express concerns about faceto-face public speaking and networking.These concerns include, but are not limited to, "fewer chances to practice and communicate with teachers and other students," "how to use body language," "inability to read the audience, " and "heightened introversion." 71% of the students in this study stated that they do not "feel prepared to introduce themselves, make connections with new people and network." The word cloud shown in Figure 2 highlights the students' choice of words regarding public speaking.While some students state they feel prepared, many others utilize words such as "anxious," "worried," and "hesitant" to describe their feelings toward technical and non-technical presentations.
Based on our research, students from under-represented minorities struggle more with public speaking.As shown in Figure 2, students identifying as male express their feelings toward presentations with more positively connotated words such as "prepared" and "confident," while students identifying as female, as shown in the same figure use words such as "hesitant" and "worried" more often.Also, it is noteworthy that both groups express anxiety towards presentations.
In this experiment, we discuss our experience integrating public speaking training in an existing Computer Science capstone.The training is delivered by a public speaking facilitator who provides the students with guidelines.This approach provides students with a focused environment to practice communication techniques, apply them directly to Computer Science-related settings as they work on their team projects, communicate with their team, present their final work, and receive feedback from both a public speaking professional and their technical advisor.We report on our experience with this intervention in multiple offerings to students in our program.

RELATED WORK
Oral communication is recognized as an essential skill in most CS programs [19], and previous studies have proposed and assessed diverse approaches for integrating oral communication training.
As proposed in [2,6,15], redesigning a curriculum that exposes students to proper communication training in their first semester is a primary goal.Multiple courses are proposed that integrate some level of training to assure students develop these essential skills alongside their technical knowledge.
Many CS programs address the issue by leaving the training to General Education courses and encouraging students to take an elective course in liberal arts and humanities departments [5].These public communication guidelines do not necessarily translate to better technical communication skills since the general studies courses are not designed to help with specific major-related problems.However, participating in outside communication courses has benefits for practice and confidence building.
Another approach to training students in their communication skills is based on a seminar course required by the program [19,20].In these types of courses, students are generally required to pick a topic, develop an understanding of similar work, and present their knowledge of the subject in a written report and a presentation.However, these courses tend to prioritize writing skills.By requiring frequent written reviews and surveys, and final essays, students significantly improve their technical writing, but tend to pay less attention to the required preparation for their oral presentations.Also, these courses often require students to provide feedback that assesses their peers [6,19].While there is benefit in practicing critique, the majority of the assessment weight is on peer reviews, which might lack the expertise and guidance required for practical improvement.
The most popular approach, to our knowledge, is to construct a novel syllabus for an individual course with an express focus on communication skills, specifically oral communication.Blume et al. [5] provide a multimedia web-based platform to teach written and oral communication skills by reviewing previous presentations in a seminar course.Samuelsen et al. [23] include an additional element of an oral exam for assessment, along with detailed learning points for students to practice.However, a problem with this approach is that it requires waiting until later in the curriculum to build oral competency training on the back of previously existing coursework rather than building it in sooner as an ongoing practice.
Havill et al. [13] report on an effort to train students early on in their program by offering a lab focusing on media, presentation, and speech techniques, added to an existing CS technical course.While providing an excellent practicing environment, it remains challenging to provide enough training without taking away the main technical focus of the course.Eng [11], on the other hand, introduced a designated oral communication course, which consists of multiple oral presentation assignments as a prerequisite for the senior capstone course.
To ensure that our graduates are receiving proper instruction and a chance to focus on practicing their oral communication skills within a technical setting, efficiently and in a timely manner in their programs, we introduce our communication and public speaking intervention.

ORAL COMMUNICATION INTERVENTION METHOD
As an ABET-accredited Computer Science Program, our curriculum satisfies the communication skills requirement by offering a course that integrates technical writing and oral skills and satisfies the requirement for a capstone course as well.The senior capstone course was chosen in this study to provide the targeted oral communication intervention and measure the impact of the training.The proposed training was incorporated into the syllabus of a capstone course, "Project Sequence in Computer Science and Engineering", a two-quarter (20 weeks) course required by the Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Data Science major programs.Students generally take the course during their senior year.The capstone course aims to engage students in real-world application projects proposed by industry partners, non-profits, and government agencies.Thus, communicating their technical expertise beyond the walls of our discipline is a key mission of the student learning outcomes.

Public Speaking and Communication Training Sessions
As previous studies have shown [18], requiring students to prepare only an oral presentation at the end of a capstone course, while still helpful, might not be effective in teaching them new skills.Students tend to leave the preparation of their oral presentation to the very last week.Additionally, if the class culminates in the final presentation, students are not given another opportunity to build on their learning and implement the feedback they received on a future assignment or an additional presentation for the course.By offering the first oral communication training session in the first quarter of the course offering, we introduce the subject early enough for students to revisit, practice, and apply their newly gained knowledge in other courses, as well as the final presentation for our course.
During the first quarter of the course, a public speaking faculty or facilitator acquainted with the training holds a practice-based session.The objectives of this highly interactive workshop were manifold: to normalize the act of public speaking in our field, to increase students' comfort with speaking and receiving feedback, to provide exercises for students to practice outside the classroom environment, and to help students understand how to appropriately adjust their communication for technical encounters with both professionals in CS or lay clients.The facilitator starts the session by discussing the importance of public speaking and communication skills to share technical expertise with any given audience.The content of the session is provided in a combined workshop/lecture manner in the following steps: -STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) [7]: this method guides a speaker on how to (1) provide a brief context of background, (2) explain what needed to be done, (3) use specific examples of actions that were taken to complete the task and (4) discuss metrics accomplished in the work.-PARS (Problem, Action, Results, Skills) [16]: this method guides a speaker on how to (1) provide a brief context of background, ( 2) explain what was being done, (3) describe the achievements, and ( 4) discuss what transferable skills were learned.• The students are asked to volunteer and explain a previous project or situation in the given structure.The goals of the exercise are for students to practice speaking aloud, organize themselves while speaking extemporaneously, communicate in a way that minimizes jargon for an outside audience, and make legible the purpose and impact of their work.Another goal is to strengthen students' comfort and confidence when speaking about their research projects and touting their expertise.Throughout the workshop, the facilitator provides feedback to the students.
• As the last part of the session, the facilitator provides exercises that can be useful in highlighting transferable skills.These are template-style prompts that help the speaker support their points with succinct but specific examples.The prompts include but are not limited to the following: -Share interest and expertise in a subject based on experience or education: Here, the goal is for students to tie their technical skills to the needs of an outside audience.This can be an effective interview strategy, allowing the speaker to connect the dots for a listener.-Explain experience with a specific project, subject, or tool: "In my experience with..., I have had to learn... and... quickly but thoroughly."The exercise is to be linguistically precise and brief, while also communicating unique technical skills.-Express an opinion or position about a given subject: "On the one hand ..., on the other hand..." The exercise here is to speak extemporaneously about a complex problem and to verbally walk the listener through the critical thinking process.The facilitator acknowledges that issues are not binaries but explains how "on the one hand, on the other hand, " can allow the speaker to organize themself as they detail the various angles of a problem.To provide students with more opportunities to speak during the session, they are each asked about their projects and must present a method to control and navigate the conversation and handle a given scenario.The facilitator then provides feedback which could vary depending on the needs of the students.One student might need to work on content, such as providing specific examples, while a different student might need to work on delivery, such as saying the information with more confidence.The act of rehearsing aloud in a low-stakes environment allows students the opportunities to ask questions, to hear themselves and each other, and to identify the aspects of communication with which they are comfortable as well as areas to continue practicing.Students are also encouraged to continue working on their skills throughout the rest of the course.
A secondary training and practice session is scheduled during the second quarter of the course.This session reaffirms the fundamental principles explained during the initial training and allows the students to engage in further practical exercises.Moreover, it offers a platform for students to deliberate upon their communication challenges during the previous quarter, allowing them to seek advice.

Capstone Course
In this capstone course, students form teams of 3-4 and follow an agile development process to complete their projects.Throughout the quarter, teams work with the faculty advisor and the industry advisor to define the project scope and develop the proposed solution/application.
We allow students to choose their teams.If they need assistance finding team members, we help them form their team based on their common interests.As shown in previous studies, assigning teams in advance might increase diversity and provide a better chance of overall success [21], but it requires a more elaborate selection process to ensure students are assigned to a team with similar interests.Therefore, we rate the interest of the student in the topic higher than the guaranteed diversity.
Each quarter, the students are offered a set of potential projects from industry/research companies.Working with a customer, who can be a lay client, necessitates that the students work on their general and technical skills, so they are to be able to communicate with, understand the requirements, and satisfy the client.The topic of the project can also be defined by the student to assure interest and involvement as previous studies have shown this can be effective in improving individual engagement [1,4].
Every week, the team meets with the faculty advisor and teaching assistants to report progress and discuss milestones, progress plans, continuing tasks, and problems.These short meetings help all team members to communicate their issues, discuss solutions, and craft a common plan for the future week.Students also set up frequent meetings with the client (industry advisor) to demonstrate their work and receive feedback; these meetings are commonly scheduled outside of class meeting time.The client then gets the opportunity to evaluate the project's progress, view prototypes, and possibly clarify any confusion.Regular meetings with the client ensure students have sufficient practice in oral communication with a technical or non-technical person.

Oral Presentations
In addition to brief presentations in the recurring meetings, during the final week of each quarter (week 10 and week 20, respectively), each team is required to prepare an oral presentation that introduces their project, highlights progress and challenges, discusses the division of labor, as well as future plans.The presentations are focused on the project goal, design and progress, and include a demo.We require all team members to attend and present their responsibilities and contribution to the project.Having two full presentations gives the students a chance to reflect and learn from experience and the feedback they receive.
By scheduling the oral communication training session during the first quarter of the course, the students get constant practice time through their upcoming presentations, team interactions, and customer meetings.This helps them to work on their skills and refer to the training if they are facing a communication challenge.

RESULTS
In this section, we examine the impact of oral communication training and report our experience.The results were gathered and analyzed by providing the intervention in three offerings of the Project Sequence in Computer Science.
The survey questions were designed concerning the topics discussed in the training to measure the effects.However, we recognize that the benefits of the oral communication training reported in this study are not isolated from the benefits of the original capstone course.Our study measures the effectiveness of such training proposed in a suitable environment to practice.While an interactive capstone course might improve such skills with only practice, by offering the training, we ensure to address the issues the students might face and provide them with techniques to manage them.Consequently, our findings report the overall effect of the course with the addition of the targeted oral communication training.

Evaluation Methodology
In order to evaluate the public speaking component of the syllabus, we deployed two sets of surveys distributed to students once at the beginning week of the quarter and once at the end.These surveys include four categories of questions to capture the effectiveness of the training.These categories are as follows: Technical Communication Skills: The first set of questions focused on technical communication skills to asses students' selfefficacy and confidence in communicating technical content.Students were asked to respond to the following questions using a 1-5 Likert scale: [1]-"I feel prepared to deliver a presentation at an academic conference." [2]-"I feel prepared to communicate my expertise for a job interview." [3]-"I communicate effectively with people with technical knowledge in my field." [4]-"I have received sufficient technical communication training in my major."

Non-Technical Communication Skills:
The second set of questions was designed to capture students' confidence and mastery in general communication and public speaking with a 1-5 Likert scale.
[5]-"I feel prepared to communicate my expertise for a job interview with a non-technical hiring manager." [6]-"I feel ready to market my skills in an elevator pitch." [7]-"I feel prepared to introduce myself, make connections with new people, and network." [8]-"I would be able to explain technical aspects of my major (course project, undergraduate research project, etc.) to a nonscientist / engineer." [9]-"I communicate effectively with people without technical knowledge in my field." Overall Confidence: There are also two questions to score their overall confidence in presentations.These two statements are: [10]-"How confident are you giving an in-person presentation?"[11]-"How confident are you giving an online presentation?" Oral Communication Preparation: The survey also included questions to better understand how the students evaluated the previous training.
[12]-"I have received sufficient technical communication training in my major." [13]-"I have received sufficient public speaking training in my college career."

Analysis
Three offerings were evaluated by the discussed method with a total of 130 students.As seen below, Table 1, Table 2, and Table 3 report the demographic distribution of students in each offering.It is important to note that there was no obligation for the students to respond to any of the questions.Therefore, the count of answers and the number of students in each category vary for each question.
Asian URM White Two or more N/A Offering1 As demonstrated in Table 4, there is a statistically significant improvement in all three categories evaluated using a p-value test (p<0.05).The assessment is based on comparing the average confidence scores that the students gave to each area in the start and end survey.Our results show an average improvement of 13.3% percent in their technical skills, 11.0% percent in general, and 11.1% percent overall mastery of presentation skills.
Based on the results, students from underrepresented groups started the course with a lower overall confidence score.While the oral communications training targets every student in the course, the training showed to be especially more effective within the minorities in the class (i.e., Female; Note that students who had answered Nonbinary or N/A have been excluded from these calculations since the sample pool did not have enough representatives for either).Figure 3 demonstrates that although effective for both groups, Female students benefited 4. 4% more than their male peers on average overall categories.According to our study, oral communication training has helped reduce the initial existing gap in confidence between the majority and the underrepresented gender groups.We saw an average score increase of 10.2% for first-generation students and 10.3% for non-first students.It is noteworthy that first-generation students reported a higher overall confidence increase as shown in Figure 4.
We also studied the effects of oral communication training on students with different ethnic backgrounds.As Figure 5   minorities (URM), including Chicano/Latino/a/x, Black/ African American, Native American/ Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian / Pacific Islanders or others by 9.2%.In addition to the student-reported improvements, the faculty also mentioned observing significant improvement in time management, point delivery, and confidence in the final presentations.

CONCLUSIONS
In this article, we report on our experience with focused oral communication and public speaking instruction incorporated into the syllabus of the Senior "Project Sequence in Computer Science" capstone course.We identify that this intervention is beneficial in improving the confidence of students and their ability to communicate efficiently in a technical or general setting.While the training targets every student in the cohort, it has proven to have significantly raised confidence in students from underrepresented minorities.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Male vs. Female students' scores for their preparation level in different technical or non-technical settings.Score from 0 to 5, where 5 refers to fully prepared.

Figure 2 :
Figure 2: Word-cloud highlighting students' reported feelings with respect to presentations broken by gender (pre-survey).

Figure 3 :
Figure 3: Confidence Comparison between Male and Female (Scored from 1-5, where a higher score shows higher confidence).
shows, the training improved the technical and non-technical communication skills of White, Asian, and International students (non-URM) by an average of 11.08% and the average score for Underrepresented

Figure 4 :
Figure 4: Comparison between First Generation and Non-First Students (Scored from 1-5, where a higher score shows higher confidence).

Table 1 :
Distribution of the Ethnicity of Undergraduate Students in this Study.URMs include Chicano/Latino/a/x, Black/ African American, Native American/ Alaskan Native, and Native Hawaiian /Pacific Islanders.

Table 2 :
Gender Distribution of the Undergraduate Students in this Study.

Table 3 :
Distribution of First-generation Undergraduate Students in this Study.