Poster presentations: Bridging the gap between conversations and public speaking

Introduction

So, ChatGPT and other AI apps are ensuring that the traditional essay is being well and truly consigned to the bin. We can try and shore it up with other technology to counter AI or by banning it, but it isn't going away and is only going to get more sophisticated. Anyone going down this route will likely be one step behind and will not be helping their students prepare for the reality of future work. So, those designing assessment using anything resembling an essay in the future, will need to take AI into account or accept that what they are reading may not have been written by a student, ghostwriter or anyone else for that matter.

One alternative to the essay, and which has seen increased use over recent years, is the oral presentation (Iberri-Shea, 2013). When a student delivers an oral presentation extemporaneously, the assessor can be confident of the level of understanding possessed by the students. Where the assessor might be in doubt, then this can be the focus of a brief post-presentation question and answer session. A problem with this method is the level of anxiety that having to deliver an oral presentation can cause large numbers of students. If they are overcome with nerves then they are not going to be able to deliver a presentation that reflects their level of understanding or thinking on a topic.

Part of the difficulty in addressing the apprehension felt towards oral presentations is that the nerves that students experience can have uncertain causes; the literature has a variety of reasons which explain why students experience nerves. In contrast the reasons students give for being confident tend to be much narrower. In research I conducted with undergraduate accounting students there was a range of responses given by those who felt they had overcome feelings of apprehension in delivering oral presentations and those who simply claimed to be confident in the delivery of presentations (Ireland, 2020). However, there were particular responses that dominated in each of these categories.

For those who claimed that they had overcome apprehension in delivering oral presentations, the main message was that their confidence increased over time. For some this was during the course of individual presentations. They recognised that despite initially feeling nervous during a presentation, their nerves tended to disappear as the presentation progressed. Other students on the other hand, reported that they had previously felt nervous when presenting but that with the experience of making several presentations these nerves had diminished.

Amongst those students who expressed confidence in presenting the two principal reasons they gave were ensuring the highest level of topic understanding and ensuring that the presentation had been practised sufficiently.

Research into oral communication apprehension has mostly used the PRCA questionnaire which was originally devised by McCroskey (1970) and later adapted to be the PRCA-24 (McCroskey, et al., 1985). The questionnaire has four modes of oral communication. Dyad is simple one-to-one communication, Group represents a group in a less formal setting, Meeting is a group in a more formal setting and Public Speaking is one-to-many. Research using this tool has been widespread. While there have been exceptions, generally the research using the questionnaire finds that levels of apprehension felt by individuals rises through the four contexts. Therefore, by designing an assessed activity to be less like a public speaking activity and have a closer resemblance to the less public modes of oral communication it might be hoped that for some potential apprehension would be eliminated or at least reduced. 

Using Poster Presentations

With this in mind, I recently needed to organise a speaking assessment for 96 non-native English students studying on the BA English degree. Most of their studies are conducted remotely but this module ran during a residential week. It therefore might be assumed that these students are less accustomed to presenting than students studying full-time, although there may be some who are accustomed to presenting as part of their job. For some this is the only time they meet their fellow students in person which may add to the potential for nerves to be generated if they need to prepare and then deliver a presentation in front of them. Another consideration was the practicality of assessing 100 students via oral presentations. Even if they were placed in groups of 5, it was impractical to organise the delivery of 20 group presentations during one morning, which was the time allocated.

So, I decided that a short poster presentation might be the solution. Similar activities have been used elsewhere with Tanner and Chapman (2012), Prichard and Ferreira (2014), Sherrer (2020) and Miller (2023) all reporting on the successful implementation of poster presentation activities while it has also been mentioned as a suitable alternative mode of assessment by Hughes (2005) and Altintas et al. (2014).

While poster presentations share similarities with oral presentations, in that a presenter or presenters convey information to an audience, they may be less intimidating to present for those who suffer from nerves (Tanner and Chapman 2012; Prichard and Ferreira, 2014). This may in part be the result of the smaller audiences and being surrounded by others who are also presenting their posters to other small audiences simultaneously. Indeed, in research conducted by Lane (2001) cited by Tanner and Chapman (2012) participants expressed a preference for delivering poster presentations as opposed to standard presentations. Poster presentations provide an opportunity for individuals to share information and communicate their ideas in a more informal way than when needing to deliver an oral presentation. Given the less public nature of the poster presentation delivery and the likelihood that students find it less intimidating than giving a formal presentation or speech, it can be a good way for people to gain confidence and experience on a smaller scale than with public speaking. Additionally, poster presentations often involve one-on-one interactions with attendees, which can provide an opportunity for more informal and personal conversations about the presented material. This can help individuals to become more comfortable with presenting their ideas in a public setting. Furthermore, the presenters have the opportunity to present the poster a number of times to different small audiences thus increasing the opportunities to speak  (Prichard and Ferreira, 2014). The repetition also helps them have similar experiences to those reporting confidence in presenting and those having overcome nerves in presenting which may help alleviate nerves and can lead to improved performance (Tanner and Chapman, 2012).

The Activity

For this assessed activity the content was not very demanding; the main objective being to speak persuasively with fluency and without reading from a script. This meant that the research for the task could be completed in a few hours and the posters designed and put together quickly too. For poster activities where the content is being assessed then considerably more time would need to be dedicated to the research and poster preparation part of the assignment.

So, to begin the preparation session, 24 groups of four were formed. Each group was randomly allocated a tourist destination and advised to follow a template that had been provided; they could deviate from the template but it was provided in order to make the task easier. The poster design was deliberately light on words with most of the space dedicated to visuals. The instructions given to the students reiterated the need to use few words on the poster. Members of the course team then demonstrated how the posters were to be presented by delivering a poster presentation about Bangkok (see figure 1). The demonstration was delivered without notes in order to emphasise the need for the delivery to be extemporaneous. A brief discussion followed in which the assessment criteria were discussed in relation to the demonstration and a few questions answered. For the remainder of the session the groups researched, designed and prepared their posters.

Figure 1: Poster for the demonstration presentation about Bangkok*

*Visuals from www.tripadvisor.com

The presentations were organised for the following morning. The poster presentation locations were arranged in a circle in a large room. The groups of four were divided into pairs with the two members of the group not presenting becoming the audience of the pair one place clockwise in the room. Following delivery of the presentations, the audience moved a further place clockwise and the presentations were delivered again. By the end of the session each pair had delivered their presentation 10 times. There was then a break after which those who had been audience members swapped with those who had been presenters and the process was repeated. Figure 2 shows an example of a poster produced by one group for the activity.

Figure 2: Poster designed by one group for their presentation

The requirement to present the poster 10 times was questioned and thought to be excessive by some reviewing the process. It was explained that by requiring the pairs to present the poster ten times, it was hoped that some students would experience the reduced levels of apprehension through repeated practice reported in the research mentioned previously.

Finally, for the evaluation of the poster presentations a simple template was used. Four tutors moved around the room observing and recording grades. Where a pair had not achieved a specific criterion the tutor was able to revisit during a later presentation to see if the delivery had improved. This resulted in each pair being assessed by two different tutors and being assessed more than twice if necessary. As well as a tutor assessment the students conducted a short peer-assessment following the activity. For this they were asked to choose the best poster, the best oral delivery and the presentation they felt most persuaded by.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this is the first time that we administered an assessment in this way. It was fortunate that the content didn't need to be assessed; the assessment was entirely concerned with communication skills. If there had been a need to assess the content of the presentations then more time would have been needed since each presentation would have needed to be observed in its entirety and the students would have needed considerably more time for research and preparation.

The activity was generally well received with many reporting that they much preferred this approach when compared with the prospect of delivering an oral presentation to a whole group of twenty students. Following the success of the activity, the approach will be repeated at a future residential course and research conducted. We are interested in both features of the activity and the language used by the students. For the activity, we are interested in finding out about the features which determine the quality of the poster presentations from the students' perspectives, how the students perceived the poster presentation compared with standard presentations and what levels of communication apprehension the students indicated both prior to the activity and following it. For language we are interested in discovering the rhetorical devices that were used in the most persuasive presentations as well as creating a corpus of poster presentation language from the activity as a whole.

If we ultimately need to ask students to deliver standard oral presentations, this need may vary from course to course, then poster presentations may well be a safe stepping stone, particularly for those who are anxious presenters.

References

Altintas, N. N., Suer, A. Z., Sari, E. S., & Ulker, M. S. (2014). The use of poster projects as a motivational and learning tool in managerial accounting courses. Journal of Education for Business, 89(4), 196-201.

Hughes, A. (2005). A Poster Project for an Undergraduate Sensation and Perception Course. Teaching of Psychology, 32(1), 58–59.

Iberri-Shea, G. (2013). Teaching English through debate in classroom contexts. In 4th international conference on argumentation, rhetoric, debate, and the pedagogy of empowerment (pp. 129-136).

Ireland, C. (2020). Apprehension felt towards delivering oral presentations: a case study of accountancy students. Accounting Education, 29(3), 305-320. doi: : 10.1080/09639284.2020.1737548

McCroskey, J. C. (1970). Measures of communication bound anxiety. Speech Monographs, 37, 269–277.

McCroskey, J. C., Beatty, M. J., Kearney, P., & Plax, T. G. (1985). The content validity of the PRCA24 as a measure of communication apprehension across communication contexts. Communication Quarterly, 33, 165–173.

Miller, C. T. (2023). Classroom Trade Show: An Alternative to Traditional Classroom Presentations in an Undergraduate Plant Identification Course. HortTechnology, 33(1), 111-117.

Prichard, C., & Ferreira, D. (2014). The Effects of Poster Presentations and Class Presentations on Low‐Proficiency Learners. TESOL journal, 5(1), 172-185.

Sherrer, S. M. (2020). Using Scientific Poster Presentations to Scaffold Professional Communication Skill Experiences into Biochemistry Courses. In Integrating Professional Skills into Undergraduate Chemistry Curricula (pp. 165-178). American Chemical Society.

Tanner, P., & Chapman, J. (2012). Poster presentations speak for themselves. The Language Teacher, 36(3), 15-20.