PSY460: Advanced Quantitative Methods

Week #11: Presenting Research

Today, we’ll discuss big-picture tips for the research symposium. We’ll also reserve half of the class for groupwork, to ensure that everybody is able to complete data analysis today.

Quiz: Questions #1-#4

  • In two sentences, describe what factor analysis does.
  • In two sentences, describe what a mixed effects model does.
  • In one sentence, describe what an interaction effect means.
  • How do “filter” and “select” differ in the tidyverse?

Quiz: Questions #5-#6

  • What would be produced by the following code? myownpenguins %>% group_by(species) %>% summarize(mean.bodymass = mean(body_mass_g), sd.bodymass = sd(body_mass_g), totalnumber = n())

  • Draw a rough sketch of the graph that would be produced by the following code:
    ggplot(penguins_forgraphs, aes(x = bill_length_mm, y = flipper_length_mm)) + geom_jitter(aes(color = species), alpha = .9, size = 1) + geom_smooth(method = “lm”, se = TRUE, linetype = 1) + facet_wrap( ~ sex)

Quiz: Question #7

  • Based on the following output, how many units larger is the bill-to-flipper ratio of male penguins than female penguins?

Oral presentations

  • People can handle one major idea per talk.
  • You should focus on clearly making your most critical point, and showing why it’s important.
  • In talks, the audience can’t reread something they missed–so reiterating key points can be quite useful!
    • However, such repetition is undesirable in poster presentations.
  • Focus on making points visually, without too much text-based clutter.

Poster presentations

  • Set up a slide that is no more than 42” high and no more than 56” long.
  • You should make text large enough to be readable from a distance of 10 feet.
  • This means that font size should be no smaller than 40pt.
  • Provide bullet points that will allow people to get a general gist of the research from reading, which you can then elaborate on verbally.
    • Be sure to also label your figures with enough detail to allow for basic understanding.

Audience considerations

  • Presenting to audiences with mixed expertise can be difficult, as you need to pitch the research at multiple levels.
    • If you explain your work clearly, you shouldn’t need to “dumb down” details. You can verbally signal when you are presenting nuance that is meant primarily for faculty.
  • PSY 100 students are going to want to know your IVs and DVs. Since you didn’t perform experiments, you don’t have true IVs, so you will need to explain why you are instead talking about “predictors” and “outcomes”. Since all of you have multiple predictors, this should also be explained.

Practice, practice

  • Rehearsing oral and poster presentations is essential to ensure their success and appropriate timing.
    • The exact length of the oral presentations will be decided on 4/18, once we know how many teams across Collab courses will be giving talks–but you can tentatively plan for a 10-minute talk, followed by Q&A.
    • For poster presentations, you should rehearse a 60-second gloss and a longer (3-5 minute) overview.
      • When possible, it is polite to ask attendees which version they would prefer.

Upcoming to-do list

  • By midnight tonight, you should submit your final code to clean, visualize, and analyze your data.
  • By Wednesday (unless you are using tokens), you should submit your Results and Discussion.
  • By Sunday night, you should complete the second self-evaluation. Please consider each rating carefully, and be thorough in answering the open-ended questions. You should also submit basic details about your presentations.
  • This week and next week, team meetings are optional. Please let me know whether or not you would like to meet.