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Room Set-up and AV Equipment
Ø Audience seating will be “theater style.” A head table with chairs and a podium with a microphone will be located in front of the audience.
Ø AV Equipment provided at no cost in each room: An LCD projector, an appropriate screen, and, as needed, microphones will be available for your use. Note: The cable connecting your laptop to the LCD projector provided by SRCD is PC compatible. If you use a Mac laptop, please bring an adapter.
Ø An appropriate number of standing microphones will be placed in the audience seating area as needed for the 20-30 minute discussion session that must follow your presentations.
Ø Sound equipment (i.e., amplifiers and speakers for film clip sound.)
Equipment NOT provided by SRCD:
Ø Laptops are not provided for paper symposia.
Presenters in Your Symposium
1. The session chair (a) introduces and structures the sequence of individual presentations within the symposium; (b) monitors the time limits closely to ensure that 20-30 minutes is reserved for discussion with the audience; and (c) leads, stimulates, and manages the open discussion period with the audience. Questions from audience members should be repeated before providing the response to them.
2. The discussant complements the presentations, drawing on his/her own expertise and experience. Note that time for the discussant’s participation is not considered part of the 20-30 minutes reserved for audience participation.
3. Individual presentations should convey ideas, methods, findings, and theories in a clear and effective manner. Each presentation should be well-rehearsed so that all have an equal opportunity to present their material in the time allotted.
Symposium Content and Organization
This format is allotted 1 hour and 30 minutes.
1. Organize your presentation from start to finish. Listeners tend to decide quickly about how much attention to devote to a presentation. They benefit from a clear statement of the major issues to be covered near the beginning of the presentation, followed by methods and results organized around these issues. It is often helpful to discuss one set of methods and its related results, and then move on to the next group of methods, rather than discussing all of the methods first, followed by all of the results. A clear statement of the general conclusions is extremely valuable at the end, even if it is repetitious.
2. Emphasize the main points only. Listeners will be attempting to comprehend a group of research topics. In general, they look for highlights rather than details.
3. Avoid presenting unnecessary details. Two good candidates for details to omit from an oral presentation are exact references and details of statistical analyses, such as F-ratios and p-values. See recommendations for PowerPoint slide preparation below.
4. Pace your presentation carefully. Listeners cannot slow down or refer back to the introduction or methods section, and there is a limit to the information that they can process.
5. The required 20-30 minute discussion with the audience. Post-meeting survey results indicate quite clearly that the audience desires an opportunity to respond to the issues and questions raised during presentations and they often seek to introduce additional questions and comments to the presenters. A session of candid, open discussion between presenters and audience members offers a prime opportunity for the ideas presented to be successfully integrated and absorbed.
Oral Presentations
It is not just the presentation content that counts; it is the delivery of that content that makes a presentation successful. Practice and time your presentation. Besides perfecting the timing, a practice run provides useful feedback about the clarity of your talk. One double-spaced page takes about two minutes to read, but talking to a group is invariably slower than reading, so you may need to make adjustments to your presentation to stay within the time limits. Do not fumble with the equipment, make your audience dizzy with the laser pointer, read directly from your slides, or walk in front of the projector.
Formula for Success: Good speaker + good slides + good delivery = a great presentation!
Technical Preparations
1. Preload all presentations for your symposium onto a single laptop in advance and bring a backup copy of them.
2. Design of visual aids. Keep your audience interested! Research confirms that material presented visually—in addition to material presented orally—increases comprehension by 80% and retention by 30%. SRCD provides an LCD projector for your PowerPoint slides. Please see tested recommendations for PowerPoint slides below.
Important recommendations for effective PowerPoint slides:
a. Use your slides to emphasize a point and keep yourself on track. Determine the main points you want to make and create a slide for each with a headline at the top. Elaborate on the headline, but do not use your slides as “speaker notes.”
b. Keep the background simple.
c. Colors should be sharp and in strong contrast without being unsettling, since magnification reduces brightness and clarity. One of the best ways to brighten a color is to place it next to or surround it by its complementary color: Blue with orange, blue-violet with yellow-orange, and violet with yellow. Approximately 10% of the male population is color blind and red-green is the most common type of color blindness, so avoid those complementary color sets in your visual material to accommodate as many in your audience as possible.
d. Slide transition effects should not be the main focus of your presentation and reduce your credibility.
e. Use only two levels of bullets.
f. Keep slides simple, clean, and concise. Use consistent wording. One item per line works best, so use keywords rather than complete sentences. The optimum screen content is 6 to 8 lines of 10-15 words each.
g. Use a 24-point font that is easy to read. To test your slides, print them out on letter-size paper and set them on the floor. If you can easily read the printed words while standing, the audience will be able to read your slides from their seats.
h. For processing ease and better recall of information, present numbers selectively and keep graphs simple. A chart or graph showing differences between conditions, ages, etc. is easier for the audience to process than a table full of numbers indicating the same differences. The most effective graphs are pie charts with 3 or 4 slices and column charts with 3 or 4 columns.
i. Select visual aids carefully. Ask yourself whether the image strengthens the point you are trying to make or detracts from it. Inexpensive, high-quality photos are available at www.iStockPhotos.com and www.PhotosToGo.com.
Alternatives to Handouts
We are a green meeting; please do not provide hand-outs. Here are some alternatives to handouts.
1. Display your name, affiliation, and email address in a PowerPoint slide at the end of your presentation so that attendees may copy it down and contact you.
2. Save your presentation on a public FTP site or other website with public access and display the FTP or web address with the title, affiliation, and authors of the presentation.
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