Suggested organization for your class presentation:

• Question - Indicate the question being addressed in the study and provide the necessary background to contextualize the study in a larger theoretical framework

• Methods - Describe the experimental methods & use appropriate illustrations where needed to make it clear to your audience but DO NOT spend too much time on methods per se.

• Results - Describe the results in sufficient detail; graphs are much better than words, so cut down on your words and use graphs of results whenever possible & explain the results depicted in the graphs

• Answer & Broader Implications - state how and whether the author(s) answered the initial question(s) posed at the start of the study & discuss the broader implications of the results by linking them to other studies you have read and lead a class discussion

THE OVERALL GOAL OF YOUR PRESENTATION IS TO TELL A STORY BY TELLING US WHAT WAS RESEARCHED, WHAT THE DATA SHOW, AND WHAT THEY MEAN! THIS REQUIRES THAT YOU UNDERSTAND THE OVERALL LOGIC OF THE METHODS UTILIZED, WHY THEY WERE USED, AND WHAT THE DATA MEAN. YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO COMMUNICATE THIS TO THE CLASS IN YOUR OWN WORDS!

If you Intend to Use Power-Point Here Are Some Helpful Tips:

Make believe that you are presenting your own work at a professional conference. In general, at conferences you have somewhere between 20-30 minutes for a presentation. You need to capture people's attention and make it as easy as possible for them to follow you. Thus, make sure that the text on your slides is at least 18 points in size (this will restrict the amount of text that you have on your slides, but that is what you want). You do not want people to be too busy reading from your slides. If they have to do that then they will not hear you (divided attention is a real problem!). It is ok to sometimes read from your slides (to emphasize a point) but, in general, you should talk from your slides. Power-Point is simply a modern tool that helps you get across what you have already mastered and can talk about easily. Thus, your slides should only serve as a convenient place where you have some talking points, accompanied by the judicious use of appropriate illustrations. These can be pictures of the experimental apparatus or set-up, graphic representation of the experimental design, and data graphs. In general, presentation of tables of results is a bad idea because tables are difficult to read; if you want to present a table then you should at least highlight the part of the table that relevant to your talk. Overall, it is recommended that you use either a dark background with white letters or a white background with black letters to make the slides easy to read from a distance and in various lighting conditions. Please note that you will not get extra points for fancy slides. It is the content of your presentation that counts, so please spend your time on that rather than on how nice your slides look!