Poster Presentations: Conceptualizing, Constructing & Critiquing

Abstract

Posters are important for distributing information about research to peers in biology and other fields. Scientific organizations meet annually and researchers attend and often present their results orally or in a poster format. Because poster presentations are becoming more commonly used at scientific meetings and science fairs, many colleges, and now high school classrooms, are requiring their students to construct posters as a method of improving written, visual, and verbal communication skills. However, many students are never taught the specific characteristics that constitute a good poster. Typically, posters provide an efficient means of conveying a brief outline of background information, methods, and discussion while being more specific about the study results. Posters are often comprised of the typical sections of a published paper (that is, Abstract, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, Acknowledgments, and References). However, a poster is usually brief and lacks much of the discussion-type detail presented in .journal articles. It is left up to the abilities of the poster presenter to elaborate on other important details or implications of the research. Posters should be an artistic and colorful representation of research, that tends to demonstrate the author's creativity and pride. Posters have numerous characteristics that make them appealing to the reader, including the use of photos, graphs, tables, background, and text colors, characters used to highlight components, etc. For example, pictures (color or black and white) are a great way to convey information (one picture is worth a thousand words). Background color is of paramount importance because certain colors obscure text, inhibit reading, and thus the dissemination of the findings (for example, white text on light blue background). The exercise of constructing and presenting a poster is important because it uses an inquiry-based procedure to develop written and oral communication skills about scientific ideas in accordance with the National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, 1996). Specifically, the poster construction project addresses Content Standard A (science as inquiry through a conceptual framework) and Content Standard B (by guiding learning through orchestrating discourse among students about their projects). Our objectives are to introduce criteria for constructing posters with the style and quality of professional scientific meetings and to provide a conceptual framework for constructive critique. In this paper we will not concentrate on the specific sections of the poster, but rather the physical components that comprise it and how to format them (Figure 1). We have tested our poster suggestions and procedure (Newbrey & Bahezore, 2005; procedure available on the Web) on approximately 100 high school students who were required to construct, critique, and present their laboratory research in poster format to their peers. In addition, a large number of college students have successfully constructed a poster from these instructions using the various versions of Microsoft PowerPoint, such as PowerPoint 2000 (1999). Some of the high school students constructed posters in as little as 45 minutes, however most spent several hours putting together a good first draft using components prepared from class papers. Layout & Content When presenting at scientific meetings, the organization usually provides some specifications about the size of a poster (four feet by three feet, etc.). Scientific organizations will also provide information about the criteria used to .judge posters for competition. We have included information for judging and critiquing posters modified from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting Guidelines for presenters (Eberth, 2004), because the information provides important criteria necessary for designing a good poster and developing an assessment rubric. …