In your class presentations, you and your partner(s) will be expected to present on ONE of the empirical articles assigned for the day. In your presentation, please use Powerpoint to facilitate a class discussion on the article. First, you need to demonstrate that you understand the basic elements of the empirical papers and can communicate those elements crisply, completely, and accurately to your classmates. Second, you need to demonstrate that you can critically discuss each paper—that means you post question and answer critical thinking questions cogently and crisply, and in plain (jargon-free) English. It also means that you do the same thing when someone asks you a question or offers a comment.
This part of your presentation should be around ~10 minutes (15 for multi-study papers) as you can assume that your classmates have read the article, but we want to make sure we are all on the same page. Below is a guide for the information you could present to get us all up to speed. Depending on the direction of the discussion question you may want to emphasize certain aspects below more or less (e.g., you might want to critique the discrepancy between the methodology and the conclusions the authors draw from their findings).
<aside> 👀 Tips for Presenting the Speed Review
The speed review is primarily there to help YOU and your co-presenter prepare for the construction of the discussion questions. For example, being familiar with the general and specific research questions can help you better assess whether any discrepancies between the two are meaningful. Sometimes authors might frame their question around what we already know, but you shouldn’t take that at face value. Do we actually know what they say we know? What is that knowledge based on? Theorizing or empirical work - field or experiment research?
To that end, you do not need to present every bit of information below, but you should be able to speak about each of these. You should present what is most relevant and helpful to set the class up for success in answering your discussion question. Think of the speed review as a way to contextualize the discussion you want us to have.
If you’re going to have us consider the methodological and conceptual strengths and weaknesses of the work, you might want to direct our attention to the specific aspects of the methodology we will discuss or the explicit or implicit claims the authors are asking us to accept, etc.
Please keep slides simple (e.g., minimal text).
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<aside> 💡 What is the general research question? The general RQ is a plain English statement of what the study tries to answer (Do violent primes make people more likely to see violent themes in ambiguous words?).
What is the specific research question? Here, you want to reword the general RQ so it applies specifically to the study. (Would subjects who read violent stories be more likely to complete ambiguous word fragments so they become violent words?).
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<aside> 💡 What is the overall hypothesis? and What is the overall prediction? The hypothesis is the theoretical basis for a pattern of data (Ex: as delay increases, source information weakens and source confusions increase). That pattern is the prediction (Ex: People who experience the longer delay between seeing the crime and taking the test should be worse at identifying whether they saw items or merely read about them). You may find both, or one…or you might even find one mislabelled as the other. Sometimes the authors pit one or more theories against each other (if x is true, y should happen but if a is true, b should happen). Sometimes there may be a hypothesis, but it doesn’t use the word hypothesis.
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<aside> 💡 What do we know? and What don’t we know? In the introduction, the authors probably tell you some important, related things that scientists already know, and some things that scientists don’t yet know. Be able to identify what we know and what we don’t know.
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<aside> 💡 What was the method? Here, you should be able to speak in general terms (e.g., Subjects read a passage that contained violent themes or neutral themes. Then after 5 minutes, they took a test where they had to complete words that had missing letters. The point of the test was to see if the subjects who read the violent passage would be more likely to fill in letters to make violent words). Unless it’s vitally important that there were 50 subjects of whom 26 were men and 24 were women, try not to get caught up in those details in speed review.
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<aside> 💡 Was the hypothesis supported? Did all the predicted outcomes pan out? What’s the answer to the specific (or general) RQ?
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<aside> 💡 What are the top X findings? (X is usually 2 or 3—most papers only have 2 or 3 interesting things that they find). You must be able to explain the findings using the grandma test, which means you have to explain the results in plain English so that your grandma (or mine) could understand what you’re saying. Please be sure to especially highlight findings related to our research project(s).
What are the top X take home messages from this study? Again, use the grandma test here: what have we learned? What do we know now that we didn’t know before this study was done?
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Topics for discussion should include things like: strengths/weakness of the methods/design, future directions for research, real world implications, questions raised by the findings, integration of findings from the article to other research of relevance to broad themes in the course.
For example, you might include a few slides presenting what you consider to be the strengths/weakness of the methods/design, future directions for research, real world implications of the current work, etc. as context for your discussion questions.
You must generate at minimum three open-ended questions about any of the above topics in the same way you would do for the Critical Analysis (Handout: How to Write Response Papers). This means you should use the same critical thinking stems and generate your own responses to each question so that you can articulate your own position before hearing our thoughts to your question.
If you would like further help understanding what an appropriate critique looks like, I recommend reading the attached guide (pgs. 2-4). Though you are of course welcome to ask me as well!