An Evaluation of Communication Skills among Undergraduate Students in College

Abstract

Undergraduates need to be able to communicate effectively in order to achieve good grades, maintain good interpersonal relationships, get a good job and do well in their careers. Students are required to communicate effectively in a variety of ways, verbal, non-verbal, written, visual and digital in today's higher education environment to meet the academic and workplace expectations. In the present study the communication competence of the students of undergraduate level at a sacred heart college (Autonomous), Tirupattur, Tamilnadu is assessed. It was adopted a quantitative descriptive research design and for data collection, the convenience sampling technique was used with 181 undergraduate students. For evaluating the students communication skill a structured questionnaire was used and descriptive statistical techniques were used for analyzing the data obtained. The results indicate that most of the respondents indicated high communication competence. In particular, 50.3% of students had high verbal communication skills, and 54.1% had high non-verbal communication skills. Likewise, 54.1% exhibited high proficiency in written communication and 59.1% exhibited strong visual communication. Moreover, the positive effect of the classroom instruction on students communication development is shown as 61.3% of the respondents expressed satisfaction with the communication skills classes offered by the institution. Although the results of this study were encouraging, there were still a significant number of students who continued to be in the moderate ranges in each of the communication domains which indicated a need for further improvement. Based on the study, the following recommendations are made to enhance communication skill development using experiential learning techniques, public speaking, group discussion, presentation-based assessment and technology based communication training at the undergraduate level. These will help to build confidence and the overall achievements of students, along with their marketability in the workplace and enable them to be effective in the workplace and in their social lives. The results are of interest to educational experts, curriculum designers and policymakers in higher education who wish to enhance the communication skills of their undergraduate students.