Interpersonal communication skills of speech-language pathology undergraduates: the effects of training

Interpersonal communication skills of 55 speech-language pathology students, who had participated in one of three 16-hour training programs, were assessed during a coached-client interview in which the students served as clinicians. No meaningful differences in verbal responses were found among groups. Less than 20% of all the students' responses were considered facilitative. A follow-up investigation of students' responses therapy sessions at the end of their first clinical practicum yielded no significant differences among groups. The nonverbal behaviors of all three groups were generally adequate and essentially similar. Findings indicating that students in other human services curricula demonstrated a greater frequency of facilitative responses following skill training, led to a study of the comparative pretraining skill levels of the two populations. The few significant differences found did not account for the wide differences in posttraining skill levels.