Public speaking assessment and self-assessment instruments: an integrative literature review

ABSTRACT

Purpose

To review and describe studies that used assessment and selfassessment instruments, investigating public speaking by adults from 2011 to 2020. Research strategy: This was an integrative literature review. Studies were searched on SciELO, PubMed and Virtual Health Library databases, which included databases from MEDLINE and LILACS. This study proposed to answer the following question: What kind of instruments assessed public speaking by adults over the last 10 years?

Selection criteria

Original articles that presented instruments for assessing public speaking by adults were selected. The articles were available in full format and published over the last 10 years in English, Portuguese, or Spanish. Theses, dissertations, monographs, conference proceedings, studies with discourse analysis and literature review articles were excluded from the review.

Results

A total of 2,539 articles were found, of which 21 were included in this review. Most of the studies were from Brazil carried out by college students. Studies included self-assessment instruments to investigate public speaking.

Conclusion

The investigation instruments used to assess public speaking were all different (from each other) and there was no assessment or conceptual response category standardization. The most self-assessed aspects were public speaking anxiety, voice, speech rate, communicative competence, pitch, articulation, and loudness. The most addressed aspects in the assessment instruments were voice, speech rate, articulation, pauses, loudness, pitch, and gestures.

Keywords:
Speech; Voice; Communication; Surveys and questionnaires; Scale