Giving Presentations in Psychology K. H. Grobman, Ph. D. DevPsy.org

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%). DevPsy.org

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. Don’t go overboard (Law of Diminished Return) DevPsy.org

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. DevPsy.org

Your Presence - Your Words Vary your voice to convey enthusiasm and key points. Enunciate clearly. Speak at a normal conversational speed. DevPsy.org

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 didn’t work out how I planned. I wish I could start over.” DevPsy.org

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. DevPsy.org

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. That’s interesting! Give the talk your data fits, not the one you would have given before you began. DevPsy.org

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. DevPsy.org

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. DevPsy.org

Power Point Slides Start out by making your slides plain. Then only add elements (e.g., colors, size, effects, comics) that add something to your presentation. Just because POWER POINT CAN do doesn’t mean it should. DevPsy.org

Power Point Slides 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. 44pt 40pt 36pt 32pt 28pt 24pt 20pt 16pt 12pt 8pt DevPsy.org

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). DevPsy.org

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. DevPsy.org

Difficulty of Presentation Examples of “one step down” for an audience of developmental and cognitive psychology graduate students and professors: Examples: It’s 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). DevPsy.org

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, … DevPsy.org

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 DevPsy.org

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. DevPsy.org

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. DevPsy.org

Introduction - Topic Introduce your topic with over-arching description and research question. Define the key ideas. Why is your subject important? (Practically or Theoretically) DevPsy.org

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. DevPsy.org

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 person’s beliefs.” DevPsy.org

Method - Style Describe the method from a participant’s perspective. Be concrete. Give sample questions. Show us stimuli. Run a simplified version of your computer program. Example: for the stroop task, ask us to name the colors: Bicycle Flower Blue Student Red Green DevPsy.org

Method - Omissions Psychologists and other scientists like to debate the nitty-gritty. Even if you don’t 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. DevPsy.org

Results - Details Psychologists like to debate the nitty-gritty. Give us the results (e.g., p-values, F-ratio, N). Even if you don’t 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. DevPsy.org

Results - Testing a Hypothesis Steps for reporting a result: (1)Remind audience of hypothesis. (2)Describe analysis (3)State key idea behind result. DevPsy.org

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 person’s 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 DevPsy.org

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). DevPsy.org

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? DevPsy.org

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. DevPsy.org

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. DevPsy.org

Thank You DevPsy.org