Thesis supervisor: Attila Szabó
Location of studies (in Hungarian): ELTE PPK Budapest, Kazinczy u. 23-27 Abbreviation of location of studies: Kazy
Description of the research topic:
Oral presentation is a common form of assessment in the Higher Education. For many students, this practice could be very stressful. They are high stress-reactive students who perform poorer than others, due to high-anxiety and not because of poor or mediocre preparation. The proposed study-programme 1) would test the psychophysiological stress in response to a real life oral-presentation in consenting university students by monitoring their heart-rate or ECG and obtaining subjective feedback about their experience. Then, after selecting high-reactive students, as based on the previous test phase (point 1), the research 2) will assess the benefits of pre-recording oral presentations in a closed environment (by the student alone) on academic performance in contrast to the traditional in-class presentations; 3) the subjective experience of public and private (video-taped) verbal presentations will be scrutinized in context of trait/state anxiety and level of preparation. A fourth major study will use the experience sampling method to compare the stress and anxiety in high stress-reactive students who have to do a live oral presentation in contrast to those who only record their presentations. Finally, the study will use an intervention programme in its fifth wave, using self-talk and imagery, in context of videotaped presentations, to help the highly anxious students to gain self-confidence and courage to repeat their anxiety-void video-taped performance in front of a live audience with minimal discomfort (a healthy level of anxiety that facilitates performance). Self-talk and imagery were used successfully in sport-performance enhancement, so it is hypothesized that students disadvantaged by public-speech anxiety could be helped with these methods to overcome their anxiety, by relying on their non-pressured previous good performance, similarly to the sport-training versus sport-competition situations.
Required language skills: angol Number of students who can be accepted: 1