Presenting Your Research at Conferences

This session enables participants to practise their research presentation skills within a supportive environment and to identify the characteristics of an effective research presentation. Participants will have the opportunity to view a recording of their presentation and benefit from peer-observation and discussion.

Level 1: for early-career researchers and postgraduate research students.

Presented by: Paul Riddy or Adam Warren

Preparation Required for this session

This workshop is designed to help you prepare and deliver a conference presentation and requires your active preparation and participation!

During the workshop you will deliver a short 4-minute presentation to the other participants. We will also video-record this so you can see your own performance before receiving feedback from everyone else. In turn, you will provide them with feedback on their presentations, considering the following dimensions:

  1. Organisation
    (e.g. Could you follow / participate easily as a learner?)
  2. Pacing
    (e.g. Was the session going too fast? Or too slow?)
  3. Verbal/non-verbal communication 
    (e.g. How were the voice projection, eye contact, gestures?)
  4. Interaction with the learners
     (e.g. Did the interaction support / facilitate learning?)
  5. Use of equipment/materials 
    (e.g. How was the use of the projector, blackboard, computer?)

You will need to group your comments under these headings:

  • what worked well?
  • what did not work as well?
  • what would you recommend to improve the presentation?

You may want to read this short guide to the Principles for Constructive Feedback.

Four things you MUST do to prepare for this workshop:

1. Think about a particularly good research presentation that you have attended.  What aspects of the presentation made it so good?  Drawing on that experience, list a few key components of research presentations. You may like to discuss this with a colleague. You will be asked to share your thoughts about this during the workshop.

2. Plug in some headphones to your computer so you can listen and watch this 20 minute lecture on 'Speaking Professionally: oral presentation skills'. We used to present this face-to-face during the workshop, but found that most participants would have benefitted from the advice it offers BEFORE they started planning their own 4-minute presentation.

3. You should also explore the advice on Presentation Skills provided by Newcastle University.

4. Prepare a four minute presentation on any topic you choose. Please note that the timing is important and that you will not be allowed to over-run by more than a few seconds, so you will need to practice!

I know that four minutes is not long, so don’t try and present a précis of your research. Try and pick a topic that you are familiar with and can talk about easily – it is better to cover a couple of points clearly than to cram in too much. If you pick an academic topic, you should aim it at a general audience – i.e. the other postgraduates on this course who may have no specialist knowledge of your discipline.

Our Training Room has an OHP, whiteboard and flip-chart that you can use. If you want to use PowerPoint, please bring it on a USB pen drive. You can plug your own laptop in to our data projector if you wish. If you have any other requirements, please let me know as soon as possible.