The PRPSA and Public Speaking Skills
Development
First, this is not a
graded assessment; if you filled out, submitted and scored the survey,
you earned the 5 pts. The WebCT software that calculates
this measure may make you think you got a low percentage (some score
out of 242 possible points!), but that is just an outcome of using the
software to calculate the PRPSA. The scores will range anywhere
from 30 to 170. The higher the score, the higher your level of
reported anxiety about public speaking.
The pretest/postest
survey we ask you to take in SpCm 212 is known as the Personal Report
of Public Speaking Anxiety (PRPSA) and was developed by Professor James
McCroskey at West Virginia University. It was first published in
a 1970 article titled: "Measures of communication-bound anxiety," in Speech
Monographs,
37, 269-277. It has since been used around the country as a
measure to help people who are working on their public speaking
skills.
Interpreting
Your PRPSA Score
Scores
above 131 indicate High Anxiety
Scores
between 98 and 131 indicate Moderate Anxiety
Scores
below 98 indicate Low Anxiety
The
National Average (Mean) for the PRPSA is 114.6 with a standard
deviation of
17.2.
What does this mean?
More recent studies have defined PRPSA scores of 111-119 as “moderately
high anxiety” and scores of 120-170 as “very high anxiety.” Note,
however, that the National Average on
the measure is in the moderately high anxiety group! Most people
have anxiety about speaking in public. Anxiety is typically
understood as a
physiological response. We can’t make it go away, but we can help it
work for
you instead of against you. Students in
public speaking courses around the country usually are able to change
their
perception of their anxiety level by the end of the course. But
some of us increase our anxiety during the semester and that is okay
too since communication skill development is a process. We can always
become stronger!
According to Jo
Sprague and Douglas Stuart, authors of The
Speaker’s Handbook, the learning of a skill often progresses
through four
stages:
Stage
1
- Unconscious incompetence. In
this stage a person is not aware that he or she is making errors in
some area,
and may even be unaware that there is a skill to be learned.
Stage 2
- Conscious
incompetence. A person in this stage
has made the realization that she or he is doing something ineptly, and
that
there is room for improvement. In many
cases this awareness creates anxiety, which actually increases
incompetence.
Stage
3
- Conscious competence. In this stage a person has taken a skill in
which she or he feels incompetent, has improved, and then devotes a
portion of
consciousness to performing it competently. The
absence of such vigilance is likely to mean a regression
to more
comfortable but less competent patterns. However,
if a person perseveres, the awkwardness of the new
behavior
diminishes and the need for self-monitoring lessens.
Stage
4
- Unconscious competence. Now
a person has integrated the learned skills well enough that he or she
need not
devote conscious attention to maintaining competence – it comes
naturally. The skill becomes relatively
effortless, and
maybe even fun.
Strong
oral communication skills require so many different competencies that
we may
experience a variety of the stages of skill development simultaneously. Because someone recently brought to our
attention our habit of saying “um” during presentations, we may be at
Stage 2
in relation to pauses, but we may be at Stage 3 when it comes to our
ability to
structure our presentations well. We may
even be at Stage 4 when it comes to hand gestures; as we speak our
hands move
in natural ways that help us to emphasize our points and to engage
audience
attention. Nevertheless we may be at
Stage 1 with our speaking stance and not even realize that when there
is a
podium or table to lean on we tend to balance on one foot while
speaking as the
other foot moves aimlessly. It is fine
to focus on developing these skills separately; you will soon find that
improving one area will lead naturally to improvements in other areas. For example, increasing your facial
expressiveness will typically lead to increased vocal variety as
well. If your PRPSA score indicates increasing anxiety it is
probably simply because you are currently most concerned about skills
that are in the Stage 2 level. By continuing to work toward
building Stage 3 competencies (integrating both the skills that
were focused on in this course and the skills that you know have
been successful for you, you will soon move past the Stage 2 level.
Our
goal, of course, is to reach the stage of unconscious competence. When you reach this point you can increase
your effectiveness exponentially since you can do more than just talk;
you can
actually have the freedom to pay attention to audience feedback and to
make
spontaneous adjustments to enhance the quality of the communication
interaction. But until you reach that
point, remember that audiences respond to your overall presentation,
not to the
separate elements and they will make positive assessments of your
overall
competency even if some elements of your speaking style are at the
Stage 1 and
2 levels.
So take advantage of future speaking
opportunities as you continue to work toward becoming an increasingly
effective oral communicator!