Presentation Format

  

Below are recommendations for Formatting Your Presentation. Note: on the last page I also include basic criteria for class members who would prefer to develop their own presentation format. Given that the presentations will be presented online through Forum Groups (and not in our class setting): It’s important to remember that we will be reading each other’s presentations, not viewing and hearing each other speaking in person. This means that your slides will need to include significantly more information than would be needed if you were standing before the class and using slides with minimal bullet points.  

    So, make sure that your slides include sufficient information so that forum group members have a rich understanding of what your presentation sets out to accomplish.That said, you don’t want to overwhelm viewers/readers with the amount of information that you’re conveying. The slides must be primarily in your own words: If you’re including verbatim material, you must use quotation marks and include in-text citations. If you’re paraphrasing, you still need to use in-text citations). What needs to be on each slide? The Presentation Format: —If you are using PowerPoint or creating a pdf file, you will probably need approximately 15- 20 slides. —If you are using a pdf file from a .docx or .pages file, you can save your file into a pdf format using a landscape layout. Note: below I identify Fourteen Slides — but point out that for some of the elements addressed, you may need 2 or more slides — figure approximately 20 slides.  

       First Slide: The title of your presentation and your name — your title should be specific enough to reflect the focus of your presentation (you want readers to understand where you’re heading simply by your title). Plus, a section that indicates the course name and section and the date.  
    Second Slide: What motivated your interest in this topic? Also, briefly tell us what aspect of our course reading or viewing material your topic is in dialogue with (include an in-text citation with the page number to support your assertion.)    Third Slide: an outline (overview) of your presentation. What will you be presenting? The outline should be a list of the sub-topics addressed — think of it as a road map for viewers to follow as they view the rest of your presentation. Fourth Slide: An introduction to your topic — why is this topic of interest to developmental researchers, educators, counselors, and/or policy makers. (May need one or two slides.) Then, in the following slides, present what you’ve learned from the academic peer-reviewed journal article that you selected:
 Fifth slide: The accurate APA citation for the article that you’re presenting. 
Sixth Slide: What was the purpose of the study? That is, what did the researcher(s) want to understand? 
Seventh Slide: What specific research question(s) organized the study? (If relevant, you might indicate what researchers already understood, and then what they wanted to understand.) 
Eighth Slide: (may actually need 2 or more slides) What methods were used? That is, how did the researcher(s) go about trying to answer their research questions? Who were the participants? What procedures did they use? Make sure that your discussion of methods is quite detailed and vivid — you want forum group members to have a rich understanding of what the researchers did. 
Ninth Slide: (may actually need 2 or more slides) What were the research findings? That is, what did the researcher(s) learn through doing the study? 
Tenth Slide: (may actually need 2 or more slides) From your perspective, what are the limitations of the study? The author will often identify limitations at the end — briefly include the limitations they identified, but go beyond them to include what limitations you see — you might want to phrase this in terms of, if you were to do a follow-up study, what would you want to understand or what would you do next? Eleventh Slide: What is valuable about this study? Specifically, what did the researcher(s) learn that promises to be of benefit for parents and relatives or for teachers and mentors or for counselors or for policy makers and for the well-being of our society?) Then, what additional source did you use and what did you learn? (The main question here: What else did you learn that you want to share with your  viewers?) You may want to organize this section by identifying your additional source and then describing how it contributes to what you’ve already presented. Twelfth Slide: (may need 2 or more slides) Identify your additional media or web source and discuss the key insights that you want us to walk away with. Thirteenth Slide: A list of all References used (make sure that it includes full citations for all sources). As indicated above, you should anticipate creating approximately 15 – 20 slides. NOTE: You may find that you would like to organize your presentation in a different way. Perhaps you’d rather integrate all of the material you’ve gathered from both sources and present the material in a different fashion. You’ll want to make sure that you use in-text citations so that readers can follow up with the sources that you draw on. You’ll also want to make sure that at least one section of your presentation provides an in-depth look at one report on original research (i.e. your peer-reviewed journal article) — you’ll want readers to be able to imagine the research that was conducted — what motivated it, what methods were used, what researchers learned, etc.