ATTW Bulletin

Assessment is a crucial activity for effective decision-making in every profession. Assessments are used to make admission and graduation decisions for professional programs; planning decisions for course and curriculum design; employment, promotion, and placement decisions in the workplace; and a host of other decisions that can be made much more effectively with the support of reliable assessment data rather than mere personal intuition. Assessing professional communication skills and the educational programs that support their development is particularly valuable these days as the demand for professionals with better skills in the spoken, written, and graphic discourse of their profession continues to increase.

Determining how to make useful and reliable assessments, however, is not easy. What kind of information is needed? What are the best tools and procedures for obtaining it? What criteria should be used to make judgments? These are just a few of the questions that designers of tests, questionnaires, interviews, needs analyses, and other means of assessment must consider before they proceed with a plan.

In order to provide readers of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication with useful and innovative information on a wide range of issues relative to assessment in professional communication, this special issue invites researchers and experienced practitioners to share the results of their research and experience via research papers, tutorials, and teaching cases, as well as book reviews of recent publications on assessment relative to assessing communication in the professions. Of particular interest is assessment of professional communication skills in the fields of science, engineering, or technology in university or workplace contexts, as well as training programs for skill development in those fields. Assessment research and practice related to communication and communication training in other professions, of course, is welcome too.

Possible topic areas for this special issue include but are not limited to the following:

Assessment of communication skills for program admission or graduation decisions in science, engineering, computing, etc.
Needs assessment for the design of communication training programs for professional development in particular professions
Assessment of professional communication skills for hiring, promotion, or placement decisions
Development or evaluation of pre- and post-assessment tools to measure progress in profession-related communication skills
Development of new technologies to measure professional communication skills
Development of new methods or procedures for measuring professional communication skills
Development of goals, standards, benchmarks, evaluation criteria, etc. for the assessment of professional communication skills
Studies of communication needs in various professions to ground curriculum planning and assessment development
Research-based critiques of current assessment problems and shortcomings
Evaluative surveys of existing assessment tools, programs, and methodologies
Research-grounded discussions of issues in assessment theory related to professional communication skills or programs
Case studies of effective use of assessment tools or procedures
Research on any aspect of an assessment process, such as assessment design, implementation, data collection, data interpretation, data use, etc.

Submissions

Send email proposals (250-500 words) to Thomas Orr at t-orr@u-aizu.ac.jp .

Include the following information in your proposal:

Title of proposed article
Author name(s), affiliation(s), and contact information
Overview of proposed article
Discussion of contribution this article will make to research, teaching, or other professional practices

Timeline

Proposals due: June 1, 2008

Invitation to submit full papers for peer review: July 1, 2008

Full papers due: November 1, 2008

Guidelines for submitting manuscripts

An invitation to submit a paper for peer-review does not mean a paper has been accepted for publication. Rather, all papers will undergo a peer-review process, the results of which will determine whether the paper will be published in this special issue of the IEEE TPC .

Questions related to this special issue may be sent to Thomas Orr.