Development of the Competencies: A Brief History

Developing the Expected Student Outcomes for Speaking and Listening
for the Basic Communication Course and General Education.

In the late 1970s, NCA (then SCA, the Speech Communication Association) developed a Task Force on Assessment and Testing to examine current projects and efforts by NCA members to assess basic skills of both high school and college students. This task force conducted research studies and generated products such as a compilation of assessment instruments, and agreed-upon lists of speaking and listening skills for high school graduates, skills necessary for elementary students, and skills businesses expected their new employees to have. The task force grew in size and became the Committee on Assessment and Testing in the 1980s. Interest remained on K-12, college, and college graduate assessment and skills.

Another group, the NCA Task Force on Sophomore Exit Level Competencies, developed a list of speaking and listening competencies for college sophomores. This group was given direction as a result of the 1982 NCA El Pomar Conference. After developing the competencies, they were reviewed by over 500 university, college, and community college educators. They were then given to a group of selected participants who met at the 1987 NCA Wingspread Conference. This group expanded the competencies, which were then published in Communication Is Life: Essential College Sophomore Speaking and Listening Competencies (Quianthy, 1990). These competencies are considered essential or basic skills for college sophomores at the end of their general education requirements.

Developing the Expectations for Speaking and Listening for College Graduates

In 1990, the state governors and President of the United States declared that "by the year 2000, every adult American will be literate and will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship" (U.S. Department of Education, 1991). One objective of this goal identified the importance of communication: "The proportion of college graduates who demonstrate an advanced ability to think critically, communicate effectively, and solve problems will increase substantially." [A comprehensive summary of the development of these goals can be found in Rosenbaum, 1994.]

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) held study design workshops--composed of policy makers, college faculty, content specialists, and measurement experts--to determine how best to implement such an objective. In the first year, John Daly and Rebecca Rubin represented the communication discipline at these NCES workshops. Also participating was Barbara Lieb of the Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, who made sure that the next workshop would have increased participation by this discipline, once the decision was made to go forward with such a national assessment program (Corrallo & Fischer, 1992).

In 1992, John Daly wrote one of the position papers for the second NCES workshop, "Assessing Speaking and Listening: Preliminary Considerations for a National Assessment" (see Greenwood, 1994). Daly reviewed basic concerns and issues in assessment and identified important communication skills and criteria. Rebecca Rubin, Gustav Friedrich, Don Lumsden, and Andrew Wolvin were invited by NCES to participate in discussions that were supposed to result in a list of indisputable competencies in speaking and listening. They used Daly's proposed categories--Informing, Persuading, and Relating--to structure basic speaking and listening skills for college students. Skills that had previously been identified in the communication literature and in NCA Committee on Assessment and Testing projects were used to inform the categories. Also attending this session was Elizabeth Jones from the National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning, and Assessment (NCTLA), who was later charged with conducting a study to refine lists of essential skills further.

Consequently, Elizabeth Jones (at NCTLA) spearheaded an effort to identify essential communication skills and determine if there was a consensus or agreement about the importance of specific competencies among college faculty, employers who hire college graduates, and policy makers who represent accrediting associations or state-level higher education coordinating boards (Corrallo, 1994; Jones, 1994). An extensive literature review provided the foundation for the development of a goals inventory. Numerous frameworks and research studies were reviewed. Samples of key skills under each major component of the communication process were included in the inventory and reflected those particular skills most frequently cited by different authors. An advisory board and focus groups of content specialists reviewed draft versions of these instruments. Ultimately, through an iterative survey process, over 600 faculty, employers, and policy makers rated the importance of specific speech communication and listening skills. These individuals agreed about the importance of 87 percent of the specific skills.

Concurrently, NCA sponsored a summer conference on assessment, which helped integrate government, NCTLA, and NCA-based conclusions (Morreale & Brooks, 1994) . In addition, an entire program on the NCTLA report was presented at the NCA convention in 1995. On that program, Jones (1995b) explained the study design and results and Lieb, Daly, Rubin, Friedrich, and Wolvin responded and discussed the implications. At the same convention, Morreale (1995) and Rubin (1995) participated in a roundtable discussion of the undergraduate canon. Their papers focused on the skills issues already explicated by the NCTLA project.

It is from all of these efforts that the sets of basic and advanced skills contained in this document have evolved. Some of the skills are very basic (e.g., structure messages with introductions, main points, useful transitions, and conclusions), whereas others are more advanced. The rationale for this work and some of the findings were recently published in Jones's (1996), Preparing Competent College Graduates: Setting New and Higher Expectations for Student Learning. The detailed lists of skills were not included in that volume; however, interested readers are urged to examine the works that were used to prepare the present document.


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