Modelling success: enhancing international postgraduate research students' self-efficacy for research seminar presentations

Abstract

Most postgraduate research students face the task of presenting an oral seminar on their proposed research early in their candidature. Those of us who work with international postgraduate research students know that they can find this task daunting, and the literature both in Australia and abroad confirms that these students often lack confidence in this task. This paper presents findings of a small case study which compared the influence of observing a seminar performance of a peer to that of a senior academic on the confidence, or self-efficacy, for seminar presentations of participants in a bridging program for international postgraduate research students at an Australian university. Participants responded to a 19-item questionnaire which measured self-efficacy for four areas of seminar presentation: speech, display, content, and presenter presence. The results indicated that the use of a peer model performance was the more effective pedagogical method for enhancing student confidence in this context.