Strengthening the evidence base for graduate communication skills

Abstract

Graduate communication skills have been the Achilles heel of Australian higher education for over a decade and the media continually features a range of associated concerns: entry levels, soft marking and the employability of graduates. While universities have attempted to address these concerns by offering a range of initiatives and interventions, the majority of which are offered outside of a student’s program, most fall short due to the difficulty in providing evidence that graduates have achieved threshold standards in oral and written communication skills. Seeking to strengthen evidence-based approaches, we created the Distributed Expertise Model, which aims to assist universities in de..