Virtual Poster Presentation Assignment

Overview: As a health science professional, you may want to present ideas for research projects or results of your research at scientific conferences. Scientific conferences are opportunities to share knowledge with peers and experts in our fields of study to gain their feedback. Feedback can be critical to improving research designs or to learning how to present our findings in a way that is most beneficial and easily understood by the scientific community at large. If your abstract is accepted to a conference, you will create a poster presentation based on that abstract that you will display at the conference and discuss with conference participants.

For this assignment, your peers and I are the participants at a conference. Your role is to prepare a virtual poster in VoiceThread (click on the link on the left margin of the course), which presents the findings of your literature review. In this poster you will explain the nature of the problem, the question that guided your research on the topic and the method you used to gain information, the results of your search and ideas for future research on the topic. Your “peer scientists” will comment on your findings your ideas for future research. They will also comment on the quality of your presentation using the guidelines presented in Lang (2010).

VoiceThread allows the preparation of virtual presentations. You may use Microsoft PowerPoint to prepare your poster and then record your presentation using a variety of tools: a microphone on your computer or even the handset on your telephone. Your recording should review the major content of the poster for your virtual audience. Then, your peers and I will be able to record our comments on your poster into the presentation, mirroring the type of interaction you might receive at a conference. If you were presenting at a conference, you would discuss you poster with audience members and entertain questions on your presentation.

Assignment Specifications:

1) The virtual poster should be organized using the headings introduced in Lang (2010). Since you are not actually reporting research findings, the information presented in the heading can be modified as follows:

Introduction: Why did you explore this topic in the literature review? What is the problem? What essential background information do we need to know?

Methods: Discuss the methods you used to conduct the literature review: how many articles, what type of articles, what data bases, what years? You may want to include a table summarizing this info.

Results: Summarize the results of your literature review. What did you find?

What did you NOT find? What is a current controversy related to your topic?

Conclusion/Summary Points: What are your major conclusions? Where is the gap in current research? What is next? What are future research questions?

References: List your references in APA format.

2) The virtual poster must be prepared using VoiceThread and must include a narration for the slide as if you were presenting the information at a face to face conference.

3) The poster should be prepared according to Lang’s (2010) guidelines for poster presentations. Pay particular attention to the checklist for a good poster on page 292.

This assignment is worth 15 points and will be evaluated based on a modified version of the checklist for a good poster presentation presented in Lang (2010).