Assessing the Assessment: Presentations – Not for Everyone!
By: Richard Sugg
“Okay, everyone. From next week, we will work on your individual/pair/group presentations.”
Think about your classroom experiences. Do these words spark eager anticipation in your students, or do they elicit expressions of fear and anxiety?
A quick online search or a poll of teachers will tell you that presentations:
- improve speaking skills — Presentations help students practice pronunciation, fluency, and clarity.
- build confidence — Speaking in front of an audience reduces anxiety over time and improves public speaking abilities.
- encourage active learning — Students engage deeply with the language as they research, organize, and present information.
- enhance collaboration — Working with a partner promotes teamwork.
- provide real-life practice — Presentations mimic real-world situations where students might need to present in academic, social, or professional settings.
- develop critical thinking — Students analyze information, structure their ideas logically, and respond to questions.
- increase engagement — Listening to peers can be more engaging than listening to teachers!
- are easily assessed — Even large classes can be evaluated efficiently by one teacher in a single teaching period.
This all means that students and teachers must love presentations, right?
Actually, maybe not. If we polled our readers today, I suspect many of you would say “no.”
Some teachers have highly motivated English majors who enjoy presentations. Those with English-speaking test examining experience will have heard students saying, “The most memorable thing in my class was the group presentation project.” Sadly though, many of us in Japan are not teaching presentation courses or even language majors.
Presentations are commonly used as summative assessment, but we need to ask ourselves: are they always the right choice? Reading June’s edition of the Think Tank, on evaluating teacher surveys, reminded me of how quick we are to look at assessments of ourselves to see if they are fair and accurate. Are we always as diligent with the assessments of our students we create? Revisiting Dylan William’s videos from the December 2022 issue reminded me that, as educators, we need to assess not only our students and ourselves but also the assessments we use.
Here’s what my colleagues and I found when doing just that with the presentation assessments in our general English communication classes. For context, we are teaching at a small private university in Japan. It was previously a women’s university but became co-ed in 2019, which along with COVID-19 resulted in a huge change in the classroom dynamic. All of our first-year students in the Primary/Senior Education, Global Communication, Psychology, Welfare, and Nutrition departments have to take two 90-minute English classes every week for 15 weeks a semester. Despite the seemingly obvious connections between studying English and training to become primary school teachers (who will all have to teach English classes at some point), the few students in the secondary education department who actually want to become English teachers, and students in a department named Global Communication, none of the students are actually deemed language majors. The classes are small, typically with between 24 and 30students from a mixture of the departments, and are streamed at either the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) A1-A2 level or A2-B1 Level. The lessons are held in dedicated classrooms in a stand-alone language building, with the aim of getting students out of the lecture-style teaching and into an all-English environment where they can actively learn and use the language.
During the first semester students were assessed on their speaking skills using two end-of-unit presentations and one pair-roleplay presentation. The presentations were made in front of the class while the roleplay was recorded and shared in the class discussion channel. During the second semester, all three unit presentations were made in front of the class, with the second assessment being a small-group presentation. At the end of each semester students were also assessed by different teachers via a paired speaking assessment based on the Cambridge KET and PET exams. All assessments were assessed using a CEFR-based rubric.
My colleagues and I were originally equally divided over the pros and cons of using presentations as summative assessments. My experiences in high schools had already put me off of the idea, and over time more of us began to question the validity of the seven assumptions listed at the beginning of this article.
Do Presentations Improve Speaking Skills?
Sure, if every student receives individual feedback over a long period. Even with easily accessible AI tools like Microsoft Teams Speaker Progress or PowerPoint’s Speaker Coach, there simply isn’t enough time in most students’ or teachers’ schedules. The result? Monotonous, memorized, or read-aloud presentations that reinforce previously learned mistakes, often undoing any attempts at corrections that have been made in earlier classes. Hands up if you’ve heard a student say “clotheses” or “going to shopping” in a presentation, just days after they had been using the correct version of these phrases in class. You can put your hands down now!
Do Presentations Build Students’ Confidence?
Many students enter university with horror stories of presentations from high school. Rather than reducing anxiety, presentations seem to increase it. As Curtis Kelly discussed, stress affects the brains ofdifferent people in different ways. While mild stress can improve memorization, severe stress can actually make it harder to retain new information. This, then, rather defeats the object for many of giving presentations. On a personal level, my daughter in Japanese high school has to give presentations via her iPad almost every other week. These presentations are purely to show that the students have studied the relevant material. After a year of this, often preparing long into the night, she and her friends still experience the same level of anxiety. What will they be like when they reach university? Heather Kretschmer noted: “Our students can’t always leave their negative emotions and experiences at the door.” If past presentations have created these emotions, do we really want to bring them into a safe-space classroom?
What About Active Learning and Collaboration?
Presentations are supposed to encourage students to use English while researching, planning, and practicing, resulting in them working with far more language than in a normal lesson. In reality, while a CEFR A2 level student might be able to “give a short, rehearsed, basic presentation on a familiar subject,” they rarely have the language skills to prepare entirely in English. The classroom then descends into Japanese or silence. The former is often on-topic, and gets the presentation prepared, but misses the main purpose of the exercise.
Do Presentations Provide Real-Life Practice?
We tell students that presentations will help them in their majors. Their response? “Not in English!” When polled at the end of their course, only about half of our students said they thought they would need to give English presentations in other courses, and even fewer thought they would do so in their future careers. After having it explained to them again how the skills learned in our class could be used in their other courses, some students were happy to leave the language element aside and focus on the presentation-skills element, but what then was our summative assessment really assessing?
Do Presentations Help Students Develop Critical Thinking Skills?
Not always. In our experience, many students simply copied scaffolding examples they had been given in class into their own presentations. Increased engagement? We asked students to take notes on their peers’ presentations but gave up on the idea of having them ask questions long ago. Most were too focused on remembering their own presentations to listen to others and, after their turn, they just wanted to relax!
The Main Advantage: Ease of Assessment
With well-structured rubrics, presentations can be graded relatively painlessly and students can receive prompt feedback. That’s great for the teacher, but is that the point?
Are We Assessing What We Teach?
All of the above experiences left us wondering if we really were assessing what we did in the classroom. Students discussed their hometowns, local festivals, and favorite places in class, but is that the same as presenting on these topics? Communication in a conversation setting, which is the goal of our first-year course, is very different from addressing an audience. Shouldn’t we assess students on what we ask them to learn and use in the same context as we ask them to use it in? Why don’t we assess students on what they actually practice? It seems obvious, but is it so obvious that many of us are forgetting it?
A New Approach: Paired Speaking Assessments
Our experiences with presentations prompted us to replace two out of three of our first-semester presentations with shorter, one-on-one speaking assessments conducted in the same room but away from the rest of the class. The format for these came from the first part of our original end-of-semester paired assessments. Students sat with their own teacher in pairs, to further try to reduce anxiety, but spoke in turns just with the teacher.
At the end of the semester, students were asked to compare the end-of-unit paired speaking in the classroom with traditional presentations and end-of-term speaking tests. The survey asked students to rank the assessments in terms of the stress caused, how well each assessment aligned with course content, how effectively they reinforced classroom learning, and which type of assessment they would like to have in the future.
Of our 230 enrolled first-year students, 172 agreed to reply to our survey. A majority of 70% preferred paired speaking, while a little over 20% of students preferred the presentations. Tellingly, every one of the students who preferred presentations was in the Education department and in our high-stream classes. I.e, the students who will have to stand in front of people and use presentation skills in the future.
While students’ feelings of motivation for both styles of assessment were similar, presentations were seen as far more stressful, while paired speaking was rated as more interesting. Did this mean that students were motivated by fear in one case and interest in the other? We can’t be sure, but scaring students into trying hard is certainly not on the list of reasons to have presentations!
When asked which format they would prefer for future assessments, 80% chose paired speaking, indicating that some of the students who originally preferred presentations would, if given the choice, still rather do paired-speaking style assessments. In the extra comments section, amongst all the customary “nothing special” replies, one response regarding paired speaking assessments stood out: “It was fun and a good experience to be able to communicate exactly what I wanted to say in English.” Since that’s a major goal of our course, we knew we had found a winner! Based on these results, we used only paired speaking assessments in the second semester, with a “step-up” version involving students speaking together in front of the teacher.
Both formats were rated similarly for course alignment, but paired speaking ranked much higher for reinforcing classroom learning. Again, this may be stating the obvious, but if students can see that the assessment matches what they do in class, surely it’s a better way to assess their abilities.
We also surveyed our second-year students. Of the 56 enrolled in this now elective course, 52 agreed to reply to our survey. These students had already experienced the paired speaking assessments including the “step-up” speaking-as-a-pair version in the second semester of their first year, and then again two in-front-of-the-class presentations and one paired speaking test in the first semester of their second year. With 80% of the students being from the Education or Global Communication departments, one would expect a higher level of confidence and willingness to do presentations, and more of an alignment with the seven assumptions we’ve already mentioned about presentations. However, 63% still preferred the paired speaking style of assessment. Tellingly, even amongst these more motivated students, 43 out of 52 replied that the paired speaking was less stressful, and 46 said that the paired speaking was more motivating. Again, when asked which type of assessment they would prefer for the following semester, the number choosing paired assessments rose to 70%.
Final Thoughts
Presentations as learning tools and summative assessments have their place, and some students genuinely enjoy the challenge and learn from them. However, if a course isn’t specifically focused on presentation skills, we need to consider whether this assessment style is relevant—or may even be harmful. Why not offer alternative, less stressful assessments to students, such as paired speaking, small poster-supported long-turn speaking that can lead to mini-presentations in groups, or even just recorded longer turns for the very shy students, or for any student, as regular weekly review assessment? If some students wish to present in front of the class, that can still be given as an option; it just shouldn’t be forced on everyone. Allowing students to help decide their assessments can help them better understand how they are being assessed, and reduce their levels of anxiety. At the very least, reviewing what our speaking assessments measure should be part of any curriculum evaluation. Offering less stressful alternatives that mirror classroom activities based on real-life communication can only benefit both students and teachers alike.
Richard Sugg is the Assistant Director at Hiroshima Bunkyo University’s Bunkyo English Communication Center. He has 30 years of experience in Japanese high schools and universities trying to make assessments less stressful for students to take, and more acceptable for teachers to administer. His search for a foolproof way of doing this continues!