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Guidelines for Presentations and Term Papers

This document provides some general guidelines for preparing a class presentation and writing a term paper.  Not all scenarios discussed in this document apply to your courses.  For example, if you are asked to give an individual presentation instead of a team presentation, the coordination issue among team members is not important to you.

Presentations:

The following is a list of recommendations from my observation of student presentations in the past.

  1. Coordinate team presentations: For a team presentation, a common weakness is that the presentation sounds like piecing together several unrelated topics, each presented by a team member. How to improve it? 1). Study the materials and highlight a few major topics.  2) Assign topics which are highly related into a group. There should be enough topic groups created for all team members to participate in the presentations. 3) Identify the relationship between those groups even though the relationship might not be as tight as topics in the same group.  This shouldn't be too difficult.  If your professor assign those topics to your team, they must be somehow related.  4) Determine the sequence of your presentation in terms of those topic groups.  5) Assign topic groups to team members and make sure that every member knows the transition point (relationship) from the previous presenter and the transition point to the next presenter.  6) Before handing over to the next presenter, briefly mention the transition point which creates a smooth flow during the transition, like passing the ball to the next player.  The next presenter starts his/her presentation by mentioning the transition point again but from the aspect of his/her topic area.  Those transition statements can be done while setting up his/her presentation files to avoid a silent period.
  2. Coordinate materials for individual presentations:  The technique described for team presentations can be applied to individual presentations with minor modifications.  If you are presenting a very focused topic or a few highly related topics, transition is less a program.  However, you still need to consider the transition between slides to give the audience a feeling that all slides together support a main theme.
  3. Present the materials using your own words: Sometimes, students just copied a few items from a source without understanding what they really mean.  It is easy for the audience to observe this phenomenon.  Typically, the presenter only read the content on the slide word by word without any elaboration or explanation from his/her own words.  To present using your own words is to make sure you understand your materials.
  4. Limit the amount of information on a slide: When you jam a slide with lots of words, you tend to read from it instead of trying to explain it.  There are two other problems derived from it.  First, the words would be too small for the audience to read anyway.  Second, when you read from a slide, you lose the eye contact with your audience.  The best way to avoid this problem is to put only a few bullet items on each slide.  Use those items as a reminder during your presentation and explain them with your own words.
  5. Do not try to cover too many details: There is usually a time limit for your presentation.  Make sure that you choose only those materials that are most relevant to present.  If you really don't want to sacrifice something you spent so much time to obtain, you can list the details in a slide and just show it to the audience without going into details.  That slide serves as a reference for your audience but should not take time from your presentation.  Practice in advance to determine how much materials you can present in the amount of time given.
Instructor's role in a presentation:My major job during a student's presentation is to make sure that the student spends time on issues relevant to the topic by asking the presenter and the audience questions, adding my own comments, raising issues that are related to other presentations.  Students can discuss with me when preparing their materials for presentation to obtain some advise.
 

Evaluation of Presentation and Paper

It is important that you digest all materials so that you can write or speak in your own language instead of copying the lines from the documents collected.

Most important criteria include relevance, evidence/reference to support arguments, and organization.   Performance evaluation of classroom presentation, in the order of importance,  includes organization of materials, reasoning, generation of discussion, clarity, and  time management.

There following items are general guidelines for all types of assignment and should be strictly followed.  Use them as a checklist.

A possible organization (structure) of a presentation or a term paper may follow, but is not restricted to, the structure provided below.  Divide your paper into several sections according to your organization/structure of the materials read. Specific Issues for term papers
  1. Page restriction: The quality of a paper is not judged by its size.  As a result, there is no minimum number of pages you need to have for you term paper.  However, to keep you focused, I would like to limit your paper to a 12 page maximum.  This does not include appendices where you can put detailed tables and charts.  It is a good practice to move very detailed descriptions, proofs, and charts to Appendices so that the flow of your writing is not interrupted by large chunks of details in between.  It does not mean that you should put all tables and charts in the Appendix.  If they do not take too much space, it is always easier for a reader to find the table and chart near the text that refers to the table or chart.  Remember to number your tables and charts.  In addition, you should also provide a brief caption for each of them, for example, Table 6: Per Capita Income of Towns in Ulster County from 2000 Census.   When referring to a table or chart, you can then cite its number, for example, "Table 6 lists the per capita income of all towns in Ulster county, NY.  It indicates that ...". 
  2. Format: You can use any formats found in academic journals.  Here is one example. 1. begin with the title of your paper   2. List the name of authors and their affiliations (in your case, you are all affiliated with SUNY New Paltz) 3. an abstract which is a brief summary of your paper, usually no more than 200 words.  4. a few sections of your paper similar to those described in "possible organization" of your presentation and paper mentioned earlier. 5. A reference list for external sources you cited in your paper.  6. Appendices (if any).  Please use section (subsection) number and page number.
  3. For writing a term paper, it is important to have a reference list showing the sources of information quoted elsewhere.  The format can be found in any academic journals.  Direct quotes need to be put within quotation marks ( `` ").
  4. Tables and Charts are always helpful in summarizing and presenting the materials.  
  5. For reference in your term paper, do not rely totally on those so-called "trade papers", "trade books", or company web sites.  Those are publications without going through an independent review process and some are written by vendors or magazines that might have a vested interest in the product/service being discussed.  In summary, they are prone to bias.  Usually "articles" from academic journals are peer-reviewed and they usually include a reference list that helps you find further information.  This is not to say that you should cite only articles from academic journals.  If used probably, those "trade papers" can provide good support for your paper too, but you need to balance the weights between the two.
  6. To search for academic journals, you can visit http://lib.newpaltz.edu.  Our library subscribes to quite a few online journals where you can obtain full-text articles without leaving home.
  7. A term paper can either be a broad and more general coverage of the topic of interest or a more detailed investigation of a specific area of the topic.
  8. A term paper should be typed in double space.
Final Notes

I strongly believe that in a student's learning process, the process is more important than the final product.  It means that I expect you to go through the research process strictly following the requirements mentioned above.  By going through the process, you learn how to collect information, digest the information collected, and organize and present the digested  information in a way that your audience can make something out of it.  A rigorous process usually leads to a better final product.

Thus, it is not as important which topic you choose but what you are able to present to your readers.  For example, I would discourage you from working on a topic that you embrace full heartedly but cannot find online articles to support it.  I would rather you spending time on digesting the articles you found than looking for articles that are hard to reach.  As a result, you may want to work on a topic that you can easily find enough supporting documents.  Try to understand the main concepts presented in an article, but ignore the very technical details as you might not have enough domain knowledge to absorb every single word of the article.  The reference lists of the first few academic articles you found can be a good starting point and lead you to more articles in the same or related fields.