Hey, AERA! Most researchers are terrible presenters!

The American Educational Research Association (AERA), the world’s largest educational research organization, recently adopted some ‘important changes’ to improve the quality of its annual conference. As AERA notes, the purpose of the changes are to ‘enhance the quality of the Annual Meeting as a forum for communication and dissemination of new knowledge.’

Take a look at the document. Notice anything missing? I do. It’s any recognition whatsoever that the vast majority of the presentations are horrendously painful, characterized by terrible PowerPoint, boring monotone delivery, inadequate pacing, and a lack of emphasis on the needs of attendees rather than presenters.

If AERA is going to focus on improving the quality of its attendees’ conference experiences, shouldn’t it at least pay some attention to the elephant in the room, which is most researchers’ poor presenting skills?

Comments

[Michael]

1.

Scott, I'm not saying I agree with it, but the way in which AERA attempted to address this was twofold: formalize the review process even more and switch the nature of the sessions. On the first front, instead of having reviewers that were selected n a year by year basis, not divisions and SIGs must established a review board that serves for a three year period. The idea is to make conference reviewing much more like journal manuscript reviewing (i.e., more consistent, fewer reviewers, reviewers reading more proposals - and thus being able to compare quality better, divisions and SIGs being more selective about who reviews). Personally, I see if as largely a way to remove the graduate student reviewer (a move you saw AECT undertake a few years ago).

On the second front, I don't know about divisions, but I know SIGs were encouraged to accept more roundtables and less papers, which should discourage the traditional stand up and read your PPT presentations (and the set-up of the roundtable has changed too, which make it even less accommodating for the PPT presentation).

In the end I don't think either of these will make much difference. Like many academic conferences, when the majority of attendees are also presenters it means that the quality will likely suffer (and I don't only blame AERA for this). My university requires me to be in the program before I can use my university-granted travel funds to attend. So if I just wanted to go to a conference, I have to take it from my own pocket. If I want the university to pay, I have to present. I don't imagine my university is that different that most.

I attend five to eight conferences a year. If I had it my way I'd like to present one presentation at two - maybe three - of those. Instead, as a junior faculty member who still isn't as confident as he would like to be in his writing and proposing, I end up submitted two and three and four and sometimes even five or six proposals to all five to eight of those conferences. And invariable what happens is I hit on the majority that I do submit. So I end up having three or four presentations when I go (e.g., four of the five I submitted for AERA made it in - the one time I only submitted one, it wasn't accepted and that has happened almost every time I have only submitted a single proposal).

So I'm going to AERA. I'll try to do my best on all four, but invariably one or more I'll end up with not enough time to work on them the way I want to and they'll be less than my best effort. If you're in the audience, you'll be disappointed and I do apologize for that. But I have to go to AERA each year and in order to do so and not have it come out of my own pocket I have to be in the program. In order to get into the program, history tells me that I need to submit multiple proposals and as luck often has it when I do most are accepted. Its a vicious cycle, but what do you do.

I suppose I am lucky in a sense in that my doctoral program trained me for this. There were lots of opportunities to work on becoming a good presenters, and the culture there was one where I was being mentored (apprenticed even) to become an academic researcher - and all that entailed (including presenting at academic conferences). Many in the academy don't have this experience, and beyond their proposal and dissertation defenses have never had the opportunity to publicly present their research until they are Assistant Professors.

[Doug Holton]

2.

Remember it's a conference for researchers who choose on their own to be there. They're not going there to be entertained or to get a few days off work.

The huger problem for me is that nobody out in the real world cares about it or hears anything about educational research. AERA keeps everything locked up - no public sharing and marketing of papers or videos of the talks.

And that would help solve your issue as well, because once your speeches were being broadcast to the public, you'd have to work harder at it, become a better communicator. Like Lee Shulman said, the first step to improving teaching is to make it public. The same goes for public speaking and conferences, I guess.

[Scott McLeod]

3.

@Michael: I TOTALLY get what you're saying, particularly around being 'required' to be at AERA (been there! done that!). But if I'm in the audience because I deliberately chose to spend my valuable time at your session, I don't care what your issues are. I just care that you give a good presentation, no? See

http://bit.ly/5UhIEL

@Doug Holton: Just because attendees choose to be there doesn't mean they don't deserve better presentations. Otherwise we wouldn't have any expectations about presentation quality for most conferences (b/c usually people volunteer to attend). You are absolutely correct about the larger issue being that educators don't care / know about educational research. That's more the fault of academics, I believe, than practitioners. I love the idea of doing videos of the presentations, either live or for a later archive. Not going to happen anytime soon, though...

[David Keane]

4.

The whole purpose of conducting research is to add to the body of knowledge. Educational researchers are generally funded with public funds thus they not only have a responsibility to conduct quality research, but also to communicate their results. I believe that you can only be considered a quality researcher if you are able to communicate your results effectively. I guess in this case I would side with Scott and suggest presentation skills are improved.

[Marshall]

5.

More than likely you can count me on the "side with Scott" side. I agree with the point he's making, however, I'm not sure if it is limited to researchers' presentations. Most conferences that I've attended have at least one great concept on paper that turns into a "1974 classroom lecture" regardless of the quality of the information. Much like Dave's perspective, I believe that to CONVEY the information is as critical as to HAVE the information. One without the other becomes futile. Seems similar to education in general.

[Greg Davis]

6.

I watch TEDTalk ( www.ted.com ) clips on a regular basis. Wouldn't that be a great format and feel for AERA to try to emulate at their conference?

[Michael]

7.

Again Scott, I'm not sure you are being fair here. If folks were never trained to do this as doctoral students, can we really just expect that they would be good presenters. Like I said, I was lucky that in my full-time, residential doctoral program there was a recognizable focus on training us to be good research-focused academics. Part of that was learning how to present. But not everyone gets that kind of training, and I don't fault them for it.

And if you think educational researchers are bad, you should try sitting in on some other disciplines.

[Scott McLeod]

8.

Thanks for coming back to the conversation, Michael. You're a good sport.

I'm not willing to let ed researchers off the hook for failing to fulfill their obligations as presenters to their audiences. Goodness knows many of us have worked very hard AFTER our doctoral programs to improve our presentation skills. Faculty do this in other areas; we can do this in the area of presenting too (IF we care about it and it's clear most of us don't and we pay the price).

[Michael]

9.

Scott, but do we care about it and does it really matter? Let's face it, you're in a tenure track environment. When it comes around to P&T time, do the folks reviewing your dossier care if your presentations sucked? Or do they just care that you had a paper that was quality enough to be accepted by AERA?

On a personal level we would hope they would care enough to be good presenters, but let's face it... On a whole the academy does not value presentation skill. That becomes plainly obvious when you examine some of the teaching that occurs at research-focused universities.

Is it wrong? I can't condemn them for doing what they need to do in order to succeed in their positions. Bottom line, if the academy wants better presentations they need to change the reward system to indicate that it is valued. Its the same thing with service, cause we all know that no one was ever denied tenure for not doing service if their teaching evals were fine and their research was solid.

And David, they don't need to present their research verbally in order to add to the body of knowledge in a field. In fact, I'd argue that even the best presenters add little to the body of knowledge because so few people actually are exposed to their research during these presentations. Think about it, how often do you see presentations cited in the references of an academic paper? Adding to the body of knowledge is largely done through publication, not presentation.

[Andrew B. Watt]

10.

As I work with my students to hone presentation skills this week and this month, I'm struck by the degree to which I'm asking them to be a remixer and a researcher, but not a creator. When we're doing ancient Greece, there's all sorts of places for student creativity — paintings of the Minotaur and Polyphemus, mosaics of many subjects whether of paper or stone tesserae, models of houses and buildings in SketchUp, and more. Instead, the same images keep appearing in student slide-shows, and there's no effort to add new material to the repertoire.

Largely because painting a painting is easily more work than making a PowerPoint. So I can't say that I blame those AERA presenters. Doing research is one set of skills; presenting your results is... well... something else. And doing so creatively? Well, that's something else entirely.