Rachel Siemens, Senior Undergraduate Student in the CDIS Programs

Author: Rachel Siemens | Major: Communication Science and Disorder | Semester: Fall 2023

Hi, my name is Rachel Siemens. I am a senior undergraduate student in the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas. I am planning to graduate in May of 2024 with a Bachelor of Science in Communication Science and Disorders, and a minor in Human Development and Family Science. I have been conducting research and data analysis for my honors thesis, “Cultivating Communicators: Lessons from a School-Based Social Skills

Group Post-Pandemic” under the mentorship of Dr. Rachel Glade, Program Director of the Communication Science and Disorders Program at the University of Arkansas.

Cultivating Communicators is a social skills intervention group that was implemented in Farmington Junior High over the 2022-2023 academic school year. In this intervention study, students developed their communication and social skills by participating in weekly small group meetings led by the research team on topics including but not limited to appropriate eye contact, handshakes, and introductions when meeting new people. Additionally, groups attended large group meetings monthly with the research team. Twenty Junior High students, ages 12-15, recruited by the working school-based speech-language pathologist and partnering social workers participated in the developed social communication group, Cultivating Communicators. Electronic surveys were developed using Qualtrics software. These surveys were completed by the participating students and their guardians pre-, mid-, and post-program. This project was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) in the summer of 2022.

Data collection was completed by May 2023, after two semesters of intervention, while data analysis continued through the fall of 2023. This semester I have worked to conduct data analysis and identify trends from the pre-, mid-, and post-program surveys that students and their guardians took throughout the 15-week intervention group. Overall, data shows that participating students’ perception of their social skill abilities improved over the course of their participation in this group. Students’ rankings on their perceived social communication skills on the 7-point scale improved for the majority of the given prompts. For example, students’ rankings on how comfortable they feel interacting with others improved from 2.94 to 3.26. Students ranked their ability to maintain proper eye contact, improving from 3 to 3.58. Students’ views on their abilities to introduce themselves to new people improved from 2.88 to 3.47. Additionally, this semester a paired-sample t-test was conducted to compare students’ pre-survey means to the post-survey means for the overall intervention program. There was a significant difference in the scores for pre-survey means (M = 3.5, SD = 0.5) and post-survey means (M = 3.7, SD = 0.4) conditions; t (8) = 0.012498681, p = 0.05. An interesting thing to note is the parents agree with their children on this. Parents’ ranking of their student’s ability to maintain conversation improved from 4.36 to 4.89. Additionally, there was an improvement in parents’ perceptions of their child’s ability to introduce themselves to new people with averages increasing from 2.71 to 3.33. It is interesting that parent perception and student perception of the improvement in social skills parallels.

As my research wraps up to meet the fulfillment of an Honors undergraduate research thesis, I am looking forward to the spring semester before graduation for the opportunity to defend and present my conducted research at the Arkansas Speech-Language-Hearing Association state convention in February of 2024. Additionally, I am excited to further share my research with the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas through participation in the COHEP Honors Research Symposium in April of 2024. Additionally, Cultivating Communicators has continued to meet as an intervention group with the hope of continuing progress in students’ social communication skills. The goal is to target and facilitate communication and the further improvement of social skills among participating junior high students while hoping to encourage more social skills groups in school-based settings.