Tutorial: Preparing a Research Talk in Science and Engineering
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Presenting your research in science and engineering demands a variety of skills: targeting the talk's audiences, structuring the content, creating effective visual aids, and delivering the talk. Developing these skills is a journey that will span your career. This webpage presents a set of tutorial exercises to help you with the start of that journey.
REU Coordinators and Grad Student Mentors: Please feel free to use these exercises with your students. If you would like access to the teaching notes and Kahoots that accompany these exercises, please email Michael Alley ([email protected]). |
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Step 1. Plan your talk.
Richard Feynman, Jill Bolte Taylor, Jane Goodall, Cheryl Hayashi, and Samuel Ramsey--the best speakers in science and engineering spend much time planning their presentations. Planning includes 1. thinking deeply about your audience and purpose, and 2. deciding on the order of your ideas. Exercise: With a partner or in a small group, name the best scientific presenter you have seen and identify specifically what made that presenter stand out. In your next research presentation, use this presenter as a model for your spoken words, structure, visual aids, and delivery. Reference: The Craft of Scientific Presentations, 2nd ed., pages 3-4. |
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Step 2. Orient the audience at the start.
For audience members who are not experts in your field, the beginning of your research presentation is critical. If you lose these audience members at the start, they very well might be lost for the entire talk. At the start of your talk, three best practices are as follows: 1. begin with details familiar to your audience, 2. think deeply about the order of details, and 3. include images on title slide that orient your audience. Exercise: As a preparation assignment for this exercise, view the two short films of this section. Then, take the following Kahoot on the beginning of research introductions. Each Kahoot question highlights a best practice to adopt (or misstep to avoid) for the beginning of a research talk. Note that both introductions provide an argument for the societal significance of the work, provide a literature review to show the work's technical significance, and emphasize the research questions. Reference: The Craft of Scientific Presentations, 2nd ed., pages 69-78.
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Step 3. Design visual aids that serve the audience
Many slides projected in research presentations contain too much text and are cluttered. A big reason for these weaknesses resides in presenters following PowerPoint's defaults, which were established in the mid-1980s. To create effective visual aids for a research presentation, you should 1. challenge PowerPoint's defaults, 2. find a visual-based approach such as assertion-evidence, and 3. practice with your visual aids to know what comes next. Exercise: As a preparation assignment, view the tutorial for the assertion-evidence approach. Then, test your knowledge about slides in the following Kahoot. Next, for a scene (or slide) in your next presentation, write the main takeaway in a succinct sentence. After doing so, sketch visual evidence that would support that takeaway. Using one of the templates, incorporate the takeaway and the supporting visual evidence into the slide's design. Show your slide to a partner for feedback. For an excellent set of slides from an REU student, please see the model talk by Hannah Salas from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. |
Reference: The Craft of Scientific Presentations, 2nd ed., Chapter 4.
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Step 4. Seek feedback on your delivery.
Delivery is a perspective that can distinguish or undermine your presentations. Not only does delivery encompass your voice, movements, and handling of visual aids, but it also provide a window into your confidence. For those reasons, before giving an important research talk, you should practice. Moreover, at least once before the actual presentation, you should deliver the talk before a live audience to obtain feedback not only on the talk's content and organization but also on your delivery. One quick way to improve your delivery is to try to give your presentation with the same delivery style (stance, eye contact, gestures, pace, and silent pauses) as an outstanding presenter such as Cheryl Hayashi. In other words, pretend to be that model presenter when giving your talk. Exercise: View the segment 7:55 -12:36 of the TED talk by Chery Hayashi about the mechanical properties of spider silk. Then, play the Kahoot on delivery shown in this section. Reference: The Craft of Scientific Presentations, 2nd ed., Chapter 5. |
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