With the holidays looming and winter break right around the corner, this is the point in the semester when creating and grading assignments can become particularly repetitive and mundane. Now is therefore the perfect time to try an interesting, new style of assignment—one that can also be used as an assessment tool—that highlights your students’ learning and encourages students to interact with one another and perhaps their campus or greater community as well.
Academic Posters can do all that. They afford students, or groups of students, who have been working on research projects the opportunity to display and share their findings in a clear, concise and accessible fashion. Posters offer a combination of text and images (graphs, figures, photographs) that often contain the following:
- Poster Title
- Author
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Methods and Materials
- Results, Conclusions and Implications
- Acknowledgments & Works Cited
Because the amount of information that can fit on a poster is limited, students are challenged to condense material down to its most basic parts to create an attractive yet rigorous academic product.
By organizing poster sessions within your classroom, as a whole-school or department event, or in the broader community, you can help your students to share their learning with others. When students display their posters at sessions, discussing their work in detail with all who stop by, they become an active part of their academic community.
Students should consider these basic strategies when they present their posters:
- Greet interested individuals a very brief but practiced talk
- Elaborate only when asked (genuinely)
- Don’t read from your poster
- Look at the people standing in front of you, NOT at your poster
- Refer viewers to sections of the poster, particularly figures or lists of results
Let’s face it, assessing work as students present their posters with pride can be much more fulfilling than grading a pile of exams that will be thrown away immediately afterward, and rubrics can help make grading a breeze. Refer to the following links for more details on assigning posters and poster presentations:
If you do not have time for a poster session or funds for the materials, consider moving the assignment and resulting session online; see Maximize In-Class Time: Move Student Presentations Online ... for ideas on how to get started.
For more information, contact: the Institute for Teaching and Learning at itl@uconn.edu