Developing communicative competence in chemistry undergrads

Hi everyone,
I thought I'd post an update on our Catalyst grant project ahead of tomorrow's Skype meeting...
Our project team (myself, Nancy Longnecker - UWA, Mark Pegrum - UWA) will be exploring whether creative podcasting tasks develop communicative competence in chemistry undergraduates. The project will build on our previous collaborative research around the development, implementation and evaluation of a creative podcasting assessment task in a large, introductory chemistry class.
In our previous research, we mainly considered the efficacy of creative podcasting tasks in terms of student engagement and student learning outcomes. We found that student feedback was positive enough to recommend use of this type of podcast assignment in other large science classes, and appeared to motivate students to develop an explanation of some aspect of a fundamental topic and share their insights with their peers. As an engaging, learner-centred task, it fitted will with contemporary pedagogical approaches. More info can be found at http://ojs-prod.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/CAL/article/view/4765
We also concluded that the creative podcasting assessment task had a positive effect on learning outcomes; increasing students' understanding of content material by encouraging a deep learning approach. This paper is currently under review.
For this project, we want to build on the work and look at whether this task improved communicative competence in the students, as the recently developed TLO for science graduates includes 'communication' as one of the five graduate capabilities.
At the moment, we are undertaking a literature review. We are also reviewing "communication-based" marking rubrics that have been published in the literature, to assist us with developing a coding guide. There is a real push at the moment in the eLearning/mLearning world to develop marking rubrics for multimodal materials.
Our current plan is to code each of the 117 podcasts produced by the first year chemistry class who received no explicit tuition about communication, and compare these to 180 podcasts produced by a first year science communication class who are predominantly science students but who had received a whole semester module on oral communication before creating their podcasts.
What are we value adding by running a specific science communication course focussed on oral communication? What is the difference in what we are teaching them, what they already know, and what they develop themselves by completing a communication-focussed task as part of their chemistry course assessment? As well as improving learning outcomes, do creative podcasting tasks have the added benefit of developing communication skills in students?
Any thoughts or comments welcome!