BIOS 5970: Plant-Herbivore Interactions
Presentation Guide:
1) Use Microsoft PowerPoint and either email your presentation to Dr. Malcolm
(steve.malcolm@wmich.edu), or bring your presentation to class on a USB memory
stick or your laptop.
2) Please bring photocopied handouts for each class member, or ask Dr. Malcolm to
print these before class (there are 20 students in the class).
3) Please keep your presentation simple (no animations or sound effects), with white
background, and use a sans serif font such as arial (this is arial) or helvetica and no
smaller than 20-point on the slide.
4) Pictures, graphs and tables that illustrate your article constructively are encouraged
(sources must be cited).
5) You have 20 minutes for the presentation so please aim at about 15 slides
distributed something like this:
1.
Title slide (paper title and journal/publication source, with your name) and
you can include pictures of your topic if relevant.
2-4.
Introduction – rationale for the paper, questions being asked, hypotheses
being tested. Please also include some biographical information on the
authors and perhaps also the number of times the paper has been cited.
5-6.
Methods being used.
7-11. Results
12-15. Discussion and conclusions.
5) Please leave time for discussion of your presentation so that you and your
colleagues can benefit from the experience.
6) Please note that the papers we are reading vary a great deal and so this has to be a
very approximate guideline. Thus there will be considerable variation among
presentations in terms of this structure.
Grading rubric for presentations is as follows:
Class presentations of assigned papers will be graded on the basis of 7 criteria, worth
10 to 20 points each for a total score out of 100. The 7 criteria are:
(1) Overall presentation - general overview
20 points
(2) Content of the presentation - accuracy and depth of
10 points
communication
(3) Handout - quality of handout given to the class as a summary
10 points
(4) Understanding - relative level of appreciation for the material
20 points
(purpose, hypotheses, methods, results and conclusions)
(5) Clarity of presentation - ability to communicate the material
10 points
clearly
(6) Stimulate questions - ability to generate discussion about the
10 points
paper
(7) Other material - use of other relevant papers, visual or other
20 points
aids (images, perspective, context, etc.)
Total
100 points