Communicating Your Project Results with Professional Posters
Example scientific research posters.
Student groups create scientific research posters to professionally present the results of their AQ-IQ research projects, which concludes the unit. (This activity is also suitable to be conducted independently from its unit—for students to make posters for any type of project they have completed.) First, students critically examine example posters to gain an understanding of what they contain and how they can be made most effective for viewers. Then they are prompted to analyze and interpret their data, including what statistics and plots to use in their posters. Finally, groups are given a guide that aids them in making their posters by suggesting all the key components one would find in any research paper or presentation. This activity is suitable for presenting final project posters to classmates or to a wider audience in a symposium or expo environment. In addition to the poster-making guide, three worksheets, five example posters, a rubric and a post-unit survey are provided.
Whether presenting results at scientific research or engineering conferences or presenting prototypes or final designs to potential clients, engineers must learn how to present to audiences. One presentation mode is posters, which are an engaging, tangible way to walk others through your work using a combination of text, photos, diagrams and graphs, along with your accompanying verbal presentation. In this activity, students are challenged to figure out how to communicate their work to an audience that includes individuals not on their teams and also not in their class—much in the way engineers often are challenged to communicate their work to non-experts and/or the public.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Analyze and interpret a set of data they collected.
- Present data using statistics and plots.
- Make a scientific research poster communicating data, results and conclusions.