Students’ Communication Skills of Biology Education Department of Riau Islamic University Indonesia

Communication skills are abilities that a person expresses thoughts, ideas, knowledge, or new information owned both verbal and nonverbal forms. These communication skills are essential to be possessed by students as a provision in doing various activities. The purpose of this study is to determine the communication skills of students of Biology Education Department of Islamic University Riau, Indonesia. The research method is a survey of 79 participants. To measure the students’ communication skills, the researcher used a scoring rubric, which refers to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The communication skills aspects studied are speaking, writing, listening and nonverbal. The results showed that the aspects of communication skills from the highest to the lowest consecutively are speaking (75.21, good), listening (71.04, fair), nonverbal (70.73, fair) and writing (68.95, fair). Overall, the score of students’ communication skills is 71.48 with the fair category. The students' skills need to be improved, especially in the aspect of writing in order to enhance students’ communication skills, for instance through appropriate learning strategie