Research Skills

1
Research Skills

• Week 8 Making a presentation of your experiment

2
What do I need to do?

• Create a PowerPoint presentation of the results
  of your questionnaire study.
• The presentation should last only 5 minutes, so
  don't be too ambitious.
• You will give this presentation sometime during
  week 9 or 10 to your academic advisor
• You will also need to submit a hard copy of your
  presentation (in handout format) with your lab
  report in week 10

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A slide-by-slide breakdown

• Title and your name
• Very brief background
• Hypotheses
• Population tested
• Graphic representation of results (tables or
  figures)
• Summary of findings (link to hypotheses)

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Advice

• Take a handout of your slides in with you for a
  prompt.
• Do not just read the slides out loud
• Look at your audience, not at your notes, feet,
  or escape route
• If youre nervous, look at one person and imagine
  its just them youre talking to
• If youre not nervous, move your gaze around the
  audience

5
More advice

• Choose a legible colour scheme
• Red and blue do not go together
• Have either dark writing and a light background
  or light writing and a dark background
• Write a little
• Does alcohol impair face recognition?
• Say a lot
• The experiment was designed to assess whether
  alcohol intake influences subsequent memory for
  faces

6
Figures

• Decide what you want to show
• You dont have to show all your data
• Fit the data you show to your hypotheses
• Some general principles
• Be constant in your colour-coding
• e.g. If green male participants and yellow
  female participants on your first graph, stick to
  it for the other graphs
• Dont get too flashy
• e.g. 3D figures are much harder to understand

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But how do I add a figure?

• Graphs
• Copy and paste from Excel
• Use graph-builder in PowerPoint
• Drawings
• Use Shapes tool to make a line drawing

8
Number of slides

• Your presentation should only last 5 minutes!
• Title 1 slide
• Introduction 1 slide
• Methods 1 slide
• Results 3-5 slides
• Discussion/Conclusion 1 slide

9
Plan of action

• Week 8/9 Make a first draft of your presentation
• Week 9 Present to friends to help you practice
  ask them for feedback alter your slides if you
  need to
• Week 9/10 Present to academic advisor