You will divide into teams of 2 and prepare a group presentation on a marine mammal journal article from a list of choices that I will provide. You will present the paper as if it were your work being presented at a professional conference (i.e. background, objectives/hypotheses, methods, results, discussion/conclusions). You should also save about 2 minutes at the end to present related research, including descriptions of at least 5 related studies and how they support or contradict your findings. These 5 studies must be cited (include a bibliography as your final slide), and none can be from the internet, unless they are from a peer-reviewed on-line journal. Presentation dates will be assigned after you have picked a topic. Both team members should contribute equally to the background preparation as well as the actual presentation (you will evaluate yourself and your partner at the end). Presentations are to be approximately 15 minutes in length. Any team which goes under 12 minutes or over 18 minutes will lose 10% of their presentation grade. Presentations must be designed on Powerpoint, and you cannot use any other notes or aids other than the Powerpoint presentation. If you use note cards, I will tear them up, and I expect that you will not simply "read" off the screen. I can help you to learn the program if no one in your group has used it. You can also click HERE to get tips, suggestions, templates, etc. for powerpoint presentations.

Each group will turn into me one hard copy of the presentation and one copy of the presentation on disk (if it doesn’t fit on a floppy, a CD or 100 MB Zip will do, or you can send it as an attachment). You should build and save your presentation as a PowerPoint 97 file. I will make your presentation available to all students in the class via the class web page. You should also provide me with a copy of your article about 1 week before your presentation.

Material from the presentations will be included in the regular lab quizzes. Therefore, you should take notes on other groups’ presentations and use their presentations on the course web page to review the material before a quiz. Grading for the group presentations will be: (1) 70% Presentation content (quality and organization), and (2) 30 % Presentation style (voice, eye contact, clarity...).

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