Giving%20Presentations%20in%20Psychology%20K.%20H.%20Grobman,%20Ph.%20D.

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Giving Presentationsin PsychologyK. H.
Grobman, Ph. D.
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Length of Presentation
How much time can you speak? Subtract for
distractions. Allot about 25 of time for
discussion. Prepare your talk to fit the
remaining time (75).
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Preparation

• Talks are milestones. Push yourself to your
  limit in the days before your talk.
• Practice your talk.
• Practice by yourself for timing.
• Practice with friends or lab for comfort.

• ? Practicing even just once can dramatically
  improve how smoothly you speak.
• Dont go overboard (Law of Diminished Return)

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Your Presence - Your Body
Talk to your audience. Do not read to your
audience. Do not talk to your computer or the
projected slides. Be happy to be able to tell
your audience about something so interesting.
Smile. Move around. Use gestures to convey
meaning and highlight slides.
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Your Presence - Your Words
Vary your voice to convey enthusiasm and key
points. Enunciate clearly. Speak at a normal
conversational speed.
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Your Confidence
Be confident. How can I possibly be confident
presenting in front of all of these professors,
who are so critical, and who look for every
possible flaw? There are flaws and mistakes
everywhere in my study. It didnt work out how I
planned. I wish I could start over.
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Confidence - Thoughts to Remember
Your audience might know a lot. Your advisor
might know more about the subject matter than
you. However, you know more about your study
than anybody else.
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Confidence - Thoughts to Remember
There is something interesting about your study,
even if it did not work out. If it did not work
out, that means something unexpected happened.
Thats interesting! Give the talk your data
fits, not the one you would have given before you
began.
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Confidence - Thoughts to Remember
You made mistakes and did not account for
everything. Do not be apologetic or get bogged
down in describing mistakes. Acknowledge
problems matter-of-factly. Present your study
positively. No study finds out everything. Most
short-comings are just opportunities for future
research.
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Confidence - Thoughts to Remember
Professors are very critical about ideas,
especially what they study. Is being critical
domain-specific? My impression is that those who
are most focused on critically examining ideas
are least interested in being critical of other
people.
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Power Point Slides
Just
because
CAN
doesnt mean it should.
POWER POINT
Something,
do
Start out by making your slides plain. Then only
add elements (e.g., colors, size, effects,
comics) that add something to your presentation.
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Power Point Slides
44pt 40pt 36pt 32pt 28pt 24pt 20pt 16pt 12pt 8pt
Use a large font. Write as few words as
possible. People naturally read whatever you put
on a slide. When you put bullet points on your
slides, you give your audience a structure to
follow the substance you convey with your voice.
But if you write out long sentences in small
font, your audience will pay more attention to
your slides than to you.
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Difficulty of Presentation
If you can be simple, do not be complex. Avoid
using jargon or acronyms whenever possible. Aim
for simplicity in every aspect of your talk, not
just language (e.g., data, literature review,
graphs).
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Difficulty of Presentation
Know your audience and drop down the
sophistication one step.

• Examples
• ? Presenting to cognitive and developmental
  professors and graduate students? Speak for
  professors and graduate students in any area of
  psychology.
• Presenting at a conference on memory? Speak for
  researchers in any area of cognition.

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Difficulty of Presentation
Examples of one step down for an audience of
developmental and cognitive psychology graduate
students and professors

• Examples
• Its too many steps down to define longitudinal
  study, within-subject, or ANOVA.
• Define advanced statistics and specialized
  concepts in cognitive or developmental psychology
  (e.g., microgenetic method, logistic regression).

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Difficulty of Presentation
Explain complex ideas simply, but never too
simply. Do not add words just to tell us you
should not have to tell us something.

• ? Logistic regression is a regression with
  dichotomous data.
• ? A microgenetic approach measures something
  repeatedly, far more often than it changes. It
  makes our measurements like frames in a movie so
  we can see development as it happens.
• As all of you know, a microgenetic
• This difference is significant, like I said in my
  talk last year,

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Parts of Presentation

• Science has a conventional format for presenting
  a study.
• Follow convention unless there is a convincing
  reason not to.
• Do not tell us that you are going to follow
  convention.
• Too simple dropping more that one step.

Introduction Method Results Discussion
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Parts of Presentation

• Allocate your talking time where it matters. Use
  3/4 of your time to tell us about your work.
• 17 Introduction
• 37 Method
• 37 Results
• 9 Discussion
• Prepare the parts of your talk that matter most
  first.

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Goal for Presentation
What is your take home message? Your point is
a big idea, not a fact. Everything you present
should convey your big idea.
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Introduction - Topic
Introduce your topic with over-arching
description and research question. Define the
key ideas. Why is your subject
important? (Practically or Theoretically)
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Introduction - Literature Review

• ? A study is related because of theoretical
  constructs, not just operational definitions.
• ? Laundry List of Results.
• Remember your big idea. Give us just enough to
  understand your study.

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Introduction - Hypotheses
Say hypotheses in everyday language and
theoretical constructs. Do not use method or
results language.
? We predicted 4-year-olds performance on the
day-night stroop task will be positively
correlated with performance on the false-belief
task. ? We predicted 4-year-olds who can
inhibit well are more likely to understand
another persons beliefs.
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Method - Style
Example for the stroop task, ask us to name the
colors Bicycle Flower Blue Student Red Green
Describe the method from a participants
perspective. Be concrete.
Give sample questions. Show us stimuli. Run a
simplified version of your computer program.
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Method - Omissions
Psychologists and other scientists like to debate
the nitty-gritty. Even if you dont say details,
put them on slides (e.g., participant
demographics). If you are not going to talk
about every task you administered, acknowledge
you did them, but do not give more detail.
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Results - Details
Psychologists like to debate the nitty-gritty.
Give us the results (e.g., p-values, F-ratio, N).
Even if you dont say details aloud, put them on
slides. Graphs show the big picture they are
especially engaging. Tables work too. Present a
result for each hypothesis in order.
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Results - Testing a Hypothesis
Steps for reporting a result (1) Remind
audience of hypothesis. (2) Describe
analysis (3) State key idea behind result.
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Results - Testing a Hypothesis
Example of steps for reporting a result (1)
Remind audience of hypothesis. (2) Describe
analysis (3) State key idea behind result.
To test the hypothesis that 4-year-olds who can
inhibit well are more likely to understand
another persons beliefs, we correlated the
day-night stroop task with the false-belief task.
The positive correlation supports our
hypothesis.
r .54, p .03, n 36
Note. made-up results
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Discussion
Summarize your major results in everyday language
or theoretical constructs. Describe limitation
of your study. Frame limitations as
possible future studies. Describe your long-term
plans for this research. End with a grand
concluding remark (e.g., hopes for
future).
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Questions
Anticipate Questions. Be able to justify your
decisions (method, analyses). How would someone
who is skeptical of your big idea counter your
findings? How would you respond?
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Questions
Make extra slides. Histograms of
data. Analyses not presented. Block
quotations from famous papers. Do not make
extra slides to anticipate questions you can
answer in a sentence or two.
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Keep Your Perspective
Giving a talk is a skill you learn through
practice. Your compare your talk to the ideal in
your mind. Your audience compares your talk to
never attending it. Just caring enough to try
and give a better talk is often enough to make a
great talk.
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Thank You
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