Summer Scholars Scientific Communication Workshop 2014Katherine Kantardjieff, CSM

Greetings Summer Scholars! The materials through which this set of instructions will guide you are taken from a writing course for the sciences I developed when I was a faculty member on another CSU campus. That course met the upper division writing requirements for the majors.

A number of PowerPoint files (converted to pdf) have been uploaded to the community moodle container and, if you have found them, then you are reading this document. We will not have time to go through all of the materials, so you are asked to read through them and use them as resources as you prepare the various presentations of your work during the summer.

1. A file about oral presentations and effective PowerPoint presentations was uploaded before your first presentation earlier in June, but not everyone saw this. I would encourage you to think back about your first talk and whether you adhered to these guidelines for effective oral presentations. If you didn’t, that’s okay. You now have a resource to help you for the next time you are called upon to discuss your research.

2. There are several files about the scientific method and writing a scientific paper. These are:

a. What Is Scienceb. Scientific Paper 1, 2 and 3c. Illustrations Tables Citationsd. Posters

3. I have also included some files that describe rubrics for evaluating oral presentations, posters, and slides about research findings. While these will not be formally used this summer to give you grades, they do give you a good sense of what people will be thinking about when they listen to your talks or attend your poster presentation. In addition to the rubrics, there are a couple of analytical tracking sheets. These pertain to writing. Again, while these will not be formally used in evaluating your written report, they do give you a good idea of how the language of your report will be assessed. You should use all of these to guide you.

4. For our workshop on July 10, we are going to focus primarily on two things: writing a scientific paper and preparing a poster. Your reports that describe your work will probably be in the form of a scientific paper, and your summer experience will culminate with the presentation of work in poster format.

a. Please read through the materials outlined in 2) above. We will review these during the workshop.

b. Please bring with you the introduction you recently prepared. c. Please bring with you any results you have from your project so far.d. Be prepared for a very interactive session and to have some productive fun.