Indicators for evaluating public speaking in adults: a scoping review.
Willian Hote Scanferla, Anna Carolina Ferreira Marinho, Adriane Mesquita de Medeiros and 1 others
PMID 42054185WHAT IT FOUND
The rating scales used to judge adult public speaking are mostly homemade: 26 of 35 studies used indicators the researchers wrote themselves rather than a validated tool.
Four areas recur anyway: how the talk is structured, nonverbal behaviour, voice, and language.
Key findings
01Most instruments used to judge adult public speaking were written by the researchers for their own study: 26 of the 35 studies used author-developed indicators, and nine used a validated protocol.
02The validated instruments all rated nonverbal behaviour such as gestures, eye contact, body posture and facial expressions, and most also rated the structure of the talk and vocal expressiveness.
03Among the studies using researcher-made instruments, eye contact was the indicator rated most often (17 of the 26 studies), ahead of gestures and speech volume (14 studies each).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The search was limited to English, Portuguese and Spanish, so work published in other languages was missed. Only indexed journals were searched. Theses, dissertations, conference papers and other unpublished material were left out, which may have narrowed what the review could map. Indicators that different studies named differently had to be grouped together, and those judgements may have introduced inconsistency into the counts. The authors note that this also made the results easier to organise into comparable domains. Because only studies where a human judge observed the speaker were included, the review says nothing about self-rating or technology-based assessment of public speaking.
Declared interests
The funding and conflicts section reports only financial support from CAPES (88887.899755/2023-00), a Brazilian federal research funding agency. No competing interests are declared in it.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the recurring indicators as a validated checklist for judging a speech. This review maps what researchers and evaluators actually used, not what predicts a better talk: only nine of the 35 studies used an instrument that had been validated beforehand, and the review did not test whether any indicator relates to how an audience receives the presentation.
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