Assignment

Interpersonal Skills (IPS)

Antje Wild & Andy Weeger

Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences

July 10, 2025

Task

Select two topics, take on challenges, reflect your learning journey & present your findings

You need to choose two topics in which you want to improve your interpersonal skills.

During the semester you will deeply reflect on these topics (based on the lectures and your own readings), take challenges that we present during the lectures, and try to improve.

At the end of the semester, you will present a reflection on your personal ‘learning journey’. You will focus on your experiences with the challenges proposed in the lectures and place them in the context of current theoretical and empirical findings.

Presentation

The presentation covers your learning journey in one of the topics you have chosen.

It should reflect and extend the contents of this course*, showcase your engagement with further literature, and as such address the following questions:

• Which topics did you choose for your personal development and why?
• What challenges did you choose to grow in the field?
• What changed during the 12 weeks?
• How can you theoretically explain the effect(s)?¹
  
• What did you learn that you would recommend to others?

The presentation should take min. 6 minutes, max. 7 minutes; a short Q&A follows (approx. 4 minutes, focus on the theoretical reflection and understanding of literature).

Additional deliveries

We further expect:

• The learnings and reflections of the second topic. These need to be documented on slides in the appendix of the presentation and must be understandable without further oral explanation.
• A reflection of four topics that you did not chose for your final presentation. Prepare one slide per topic that answers the question of what you take away from the lecture unit and put it to the appendix of your slide deck.

Summary

Your final exam will consist of four components:

1. An oral presentation, supported by slides on one of your topics. After your presentation, we will ask questions about the topic and especially about the scientific literature that you used to support your arguments. You will have 7 minutes presentation time.
2. Slides for your second topic, which will not be presented, and which should be understandable by reading through them (appendix of your deck).
3. One slide for four topics that you did not choose for your final presentation, summarizing your most important learnings from that lecture (appendix of your deck)
4. Your declaration of AI usage (see template)

Grading

The grading is not based on the total amount of challenges you completed or how many of them were on level 3.

We take into account your learning journey, your development over the course and the reflection with regard to the scientific literature.

If you decide to only complete challenges on level 1, however, it might be hard to gather enough material for a good or excellent presentation at the end.

We strongly recommend maintaining a learning dictionary and documenting your progress. Taking pictures throughout your journey can also be helpful when preparing your final presentation.

Important notes

This is a master level course. This means, that scientific concepts and understanding academic papers are valued highly.

While the challenges are the basis for your presentation, the importance of the theoretical reflection is very high. Make sure that you connect your challenges to scientific, high quality papers².

We expect in-text citations (APA 7th) including page numbers.

We will also ask about findings from these papers during the Q&A, so it is important to truly understand the underlying concepts.

Evaluation criteria

An excellent presentation has the following characteristics

Presentation

• The presenter is confident and easy to understand
  
• The audience is engaged in an informative and entertaining way
  
• The time was effectively and economically used

Learnings/development

• The student shows profound involvement with the challenges
  
• The student clearly presents the results of his or her learning journey
  
• The personal development during the course is comprehensible

Theoretical reflection

• The theoretical depth and breadth of the topics is explored
  
• The personal learnings are reflected by (recent) theoretical or empirical findings
  
• Profound knowledge of the topics is shown, even if tough questions are asked

Knowledge of literature

• The student has a solid understanding of the cited papers

A note on grades

It is unlikely that every student will receive a very good grade, i.e. deliver an outstanding performance — see the meaning of grades. Instead, it is to be expected that the grades will spread across the spectrum.

Grade	Meaning
1 — very good	A truly outstanding achievement that (not only) shows no deficiencies in the criteria mentioned, but also gives both the supervisor and external assessors an excellent impression.
2 — good	Work that exceeds the average requirements/performance and is easily recognizable and presentable to the outside world as a “good performance”.
Note	2.5 is the average of passed assessments, i.e., an “average performance”
3 — satisfactory	A performance that achieves the desired goal “to a satisfactory extent”; however, deficiencies can be identified here and there.
4 — sufficient	A performance that “still adequately satisfies” the requirements, but deviates from the expectations placed on it in several ways.
5 — not sufficient	A performance that does not meet several of the criteria mentioned.

Last year’s results and feedback

This is the grade distribution from last year (average grade 2.5):

%%{init: {'theme':'base', 'themeVariables': { 'xyChart': {'backgroundColor': 'transparent', 'titleColor': '#0333ff', 
'xAxisLabelColor': '#333', 'yAxisLabelColor': '#333', 'plotColorPalette': '#0333ff'}}, 'xyChart': {'width': 700, 
'height': 350}}}%%
xychart-beta
    x-axis "Grade" ["1,00", "1,30", "1,70", "2,00", "2,30", "2,70", "3,00", "3,30", "3,70", "4,00", "5,00"]
    y-axis "Count" 0 --> 10
    bar [8, 7, 3, 9, 10, 7, 10, 5, 6, 2, 4]

Figure 1: Grading statistics for Winter Term 2024/25

Check out the feedback we provided for student presentations last year to get a feel for our grading.

Reference to scientific literature and reflection

The most common room for improvement was the reference to scientific literature. As this is a master level course the connection to scientific theory is highly important.

• Some participants completed their challenges but did not reference any scientific studies or very few. Or they quoted the studies on their slides but made no connection to the content of their presentation.
• Others referenced mostly books and no peer reviewed studies, although there would have been many studies available. Some students seemed to have taken the first study they found that covered their topic instead of reviewing several studies and selecting the best one.
• Some students were not able to answer questions about the studies they quoted. We understand that our questions sometimes were quite detailed. However, as we had announced that we would ask questions about the papers and named sample questions we expected students to be able to answer them (and many of you did so very well).
• Participants which received the highest grades quoted a variety of scientific, peer reviewed sources. They connected these sources to their own experiences and used them to explain the success (or failure) of the respective challenges. The quoted literature went beyond the studies covered in class and showed a deep understanding of the course content and a reflection of the personal experiences regarding previous scientific results. During the discussion these participants were able to explain the content of the respective studies and put it into perspective.

Content of the challenges

All participants should be able to provide details on the challenges they completed or how they related to the frameworks discussed in class. Some students did not complete challenges at all, or it was very hard to understand from the presentation what the challenges were.

Participants which received the highest grades selected challenges that were highly challenging for them personally (and were able to explain why). They put high levels of effort into their challenges to maximize their learning and were able to reflect deeply on their results.

General room for improvements

• Some students did not adhere to the time guidelines.
• Some students copied outputs from AI tools without citing them.
• Some students changed their slides compared to the version that they uploaded.

Submission

You need to upload the slides (pdf) and the articles cited (zip) on Moodle.

• Name the presentation as follows: studentNumber_lastName-preName_IPS-slides.pdf (e.g., 234563_hans-dampf_IPS-slides.pdf)
• Name the declaration of AI use as follows: studentNumber_lastName-preName_IPS-AI.pdf
• Collect all the articles used in your presentation as full-texts (pdf)
• Name the files as follows: author_year_short-title (e.g., Hallegatte_2009_EnvironmentalChange.pdf)
• Compress the full-texts (pdf) of all articles cited plus your declaration of AI use in a zip file
• Name the zip file as follows: studentNumber_lastName-preName_IPS-sources.pdf (e.g., 234563_hans-dampf_IPS-sources.pdf)

Q&A

Footnotes

1. Deep reflection with current, high-quality peer-reviewed literature required to answer following questions: Why has it (not) worked; what are boundary conditions, what are the results of studies that have employed similar interventions, etc.;
   We expect you to use further literature, particularly peer reviewed studies wherever applicable

2. If you did amazing challenges but only read 1-2 papers in your field, you will not receive a good grade. The same applies if you are only citing blog entries, homepages or books.