Presentation Project Instructions & Rubric Instructions • Presentation should be

Presentation Project Instructions & Rubric
Instructions
• Presentation should be roughly 5 minutes
o Between 4:30-5:30 is fine
• Presentation must make use of research from at least one peer-reviewed journal article
o Either a single article or multiple articles is fine. Reading multiple articles will probably give you a stronger understanding of your subject.
o Articles can either be review papers or experimental papers. No meta-analyses. I recommend review papers most strongly, as they are most likely to cover material at the same level you are expected to cover it.
• The article must focus on perception research. This means either vision, hearing, smell, taste, somatosensation, proprioception, kinesthesis, vestibular sensation, or multisensory perception.
o Note that areas of general cognition like mental imagery and general attention DO NOT COUNT.
• The goal of the presentation should be to TEACH SOME THUS-FAR UNDERSTOOD TRUTHS about how sensation or perception operates. You may optionally include, alongside that, information about how those truths were discovered. That is, your goal is like my goal as your professor. Imagine you are 120B professors who are going to incorporate the work you are covering into your 120B course.
o For your article, ask the question, “what did this research teach us about how this aspect of perception works?” Take those facts and organize them to tell a story.
o This likely means you would include mostly or even exclusively information about findings and conclusions
o Use a format ideal for teaching those facts. This is not the same format as used in a scientific paper. The format should be more similar to what you would find in our class slides.
 Focus on the important and interesting concepts that need to be taught. Figure out how they relate to each other and what the right way to organize them is to tell a clear, easy to understand story about the operation of a perceptual process.
o For examples, you can look to our in-course coverage of: center-surround receptive retinal ganglion and LGN cells and their response properties, V1 cells and their response properties, taste hot spots in the brain, or population coding in olfaction. All of those slides cover the results of scientific studies, but in a way that is informative without burdening the viewer with information that is unimportant to understanding how perception works.
• You must reference the article in a references page. You do not need to provide references for images.
Rubric
TAs will score your presentation for the following:
o Learning factor: presentation should teach something new that was not covered in our course material. This can include some nuance or detail about a process we covered at a more general level.
o Coverage: The student has chosen to cover an amount of material that is appropriate for a 5 minute presentation. Their ability to cover that material is not adversely affected by time limitations.
o Clarity
 The content is taught at a level that is sufficient for the TAs to understand entirely what is being said.
• Assume an audience of your peers – college students who have taken general education requirements, psychology prerequisites, and 120B, but have no more advanced knowledge of research techniques or perceptual processes than has been learned in that preparation.
• You must distill and simplify the language used so that the viewer doesn’t need to do any additional research to understand what is being said
o Avoid copying the jargon used in the paper, as this will likely include many terms that need to be defined or described more simply
 The presentation should demonstrate
• The student’s own understanding
• Tasteful presentation slides
• Well thought out organization
• Clear and coherent story
• Informative illustrations that back up important points
o Presentation slides
 Tastefully made
 Well suited to addressing the important points
 Contain the right balance of text and images
• Similar to course lectures
• A limited amount of concise, bulleted points in text with supporting illustrations, examples, or figures on almost every slide
o Accuracy
 The student should demonstrate an accurate understanding of what they read.
o Relation to sensation & perception
 The information covers sensation (e.g. transduction) or some aspect of purely perceptual processing (i.e. vision, hearing, smell, taste, somatosensation, proprioception, kinesthesis, vestibular sensation, or multisensory perception). It is not tangentially related (i.e. part of cognition more broadly).
 A litmus test: You should be able to imagine that the information could potentially be added to one of our textbook chapters or course lectures (or to a lecture on one of those senses we haven’t covered) and not be a bad fit.
o Interest & importance
 The information presented is interesting and is clearly important to our understanding of sensation & perception.
o Integrity of authorship
 You may not copy the slides or videos of any other person.
 You may not present another person’s video within your presentation.
 You may borrow images freely.
Grading:
Grading will be on a curve and somewhat generous. Anyone who submits the assignment, but submits a poor quality assignment, will earn a C (7.5/10) (we might expect this group to make up 1-25% of the class). Average submissions, which are not very well done, but demonstrate a reasonable effort, will earn a B. Most students (50% of the class or more), will earn Bs. Above-average submissions will earn As (9.5/10) (this group might make up 25-49% of the class). A small selection of the very best (1-5%) will earn an A+ (10/10).