Presentations are a poor substitute for genuine student engagement

The heartbreaking news that University of Bristol student Natasha Abrahart preferred to take her own life rather than make a presentation to staff and students should prompt us to reflect on the value of this widespread method of teaching and assessment.

In my 40 years teaching in higher education, I have seen student presentations become if not ubiquitous, then very common. The general pattern is of a weekly four-hour module block broken into one or two hours of lecturer-centred presentation, with the remainder of the time comprising student-centred presentations or workshops of some sort.

I had assumed that this had become the default arrangement only in the social sciences, arts and humanities, but Natasha’s subject was physics. Her presentation was part of what was called a “laboratory conference” and, as is common, assessment was built into it.

Natasha’s fear arose out of a level of social anxiety that amounted to a disability. But, in my experience, assessed presentations induce unhealthy levels of anxiety in most students for days or weeks before. When they come to stand before their colleagues, many students shake with nerves.

This anxiety affects their performance: presentations are usually not very good, and often very poor. Despite the copious advice we give students on best forms of presentation, they rarely feel confident enough to extemporise or question ideas, preferring to plough through notes or read verbatim from densely packed PowerPoint slides. Their trembling voices are not easily heard, and despite their willingness to support their colleagues, fellow students often seem disengaged. The cynical among those colleagues might remark that they are not paying substantial sums in tuition fees to hear other students give weak presentations on the topic in hand.

Rather than demonstrating the criticality that we would wish to see, students invariably think the safest bet is to present an assortment of putative facts gleaned from websites and textbooks. To wean them off the deeply ingrained delusion that this is a good presentation strategy, tutors would have to spend inordinate amounts of time discussing epistemology and the value of critical thinking. On top of teaching presentation skills, that would leave a lot less time for the subject in question.

The practice of using student presentation usually sails through module validation exercises on the grounds that it helps develop “transferable skills”, mainly centring on communication. But why do we think we need to teach “skills”, transferable or otherwise, in the first place? Students come to university to study physics, psychology, English or whatever – not presentation or communication.

“But they jolly well should be learning these skills,” I can hear my critics saying. “It’s part of the university experience and, what’s more, these are skills they will need in life.” Well, there are plenty of skills that students would find useful in their work or home lives, from how to reset the consumer unit and organise a spreadsheet to tact in dealing with colleagues and making one’s voice heard in a meeting. But these, quite rightly, don’t make it on to the curriculum.

Communication and presentation skills: wonderful. But don’t pretend they’re a necessary part of a physics curriculum.

And don’t assess students on them. To do so is patently unfair. The qualities needed for confident, skilled presentation are far removed from those needed for gutting a topic – agility in thinking, factual retention, critical analysis – in any subject. The greatest name in my own field, education, is John Dewey. He was a famously dire lecturer and spoken communicator but this did not stop him making some of the most significant and long-lasting contributions to educational thinking in modern times.

The ubiquity of presentations, if we’re honest, has as much to do with the calculations behind teaching hours as with nurturing communication skills. It’s about management of face-to-face teaching time in such a way that there is student engagement and involvement. We all want student engagement – but let’s not confuse it with some notion of “transferable skill” in a pretence that the latter is a validly assessable feature of a university curriculum.

Gary Thomas is emeritus professor of inclusion and diversity at the University of Birmingham, and a chartered psychologist.