2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Articulating your value and defining identity within a learning community can be a challenge for undergraduate students. Developing appropriate communication skills and strategies to improve can be taught using peer-, self- and faculty-feedback tools. This is done through providing opportunities to fail and iterate. An appropriate framework using a pitch worksheet and in-class practice helped to guide students to curate unique attributes about themselves and strongly articulate how they create value for their community framed in their identity. Students from 3 different 1st year seminar classes were assigned to create a 3-minute pitch about their identity, purpose of studying their major at Western New England University, and to include a personal anecdote. After a short 15-minute lecture on effective pitch communication techniques, students were given a worksheet to help formulate their script and were required to practice out loud with a classmate. They were instructed to video record and watch their pitch to give self-improvement. The final pitch video was evaluated by the faculty member using a rubric to score pitch performance, communication skills, and value creation. Three faculty teaching different sections of seminar worked collaboratively across disciplines to measure n=19 engineering students, n=14 computer science students, and n=8 communication students. An additional 68 students in a different seminar class served as a control group. Additionally, after the completion of the project, the three faculty evaluated the student pitches using a pitch rubric that was designed to assess technical content, communication skills, and articulation of the entrepreneurial mindset, focused on “Creating Value. To identify the interrater reliability of the faculty feedback, each of the faculty-evaluations were compared to one another and screened against an AI-based evaluation tool that had been trained using the scoring rubric and individual student's video content. Student self-perception of communication, identity and belonging were evaluated using IRB-approved pre- and post-surveys. Students were asked to reflect on the various forms of feedback and the overall pitch experience.