Student Presentations
Faculty asked students to present to the whole class (including recitations or demonstrations).
About
Student presentations are used moderately often at Bucknell, with more than half of the faculty using them several times a semester. They are used most often by pre-tenure faculty, but also by Full Professors with more than 20 years of experience. They are slightly more popular in Engineering and the Social Sciences, and least used in Management. They are most often used in small classes, and classes that meet 3-5 times per week. This is supported by the qualitative data, which says that the biggest weakness is that they are time consuming, both of class time and outside of class time, and so become too challenging in large classes, or classes with few contact hours. They are the 9th most popular teaching activity, however, as they activate a variety of motivations that increase the level of student engagement and learning.
The original study's data and analysis for "Student Presentations" can be found on this link.
What Faculty Have To Say
Strengths (5)
- Public nature increases quality
- Improves critical thinking
- Deepens learning
- Autonomy increases interest,
- Motivation, and engagement
Weaknesses (5)
- Time consuming
- Quality is variable at best, and often shallow, muddy, or inaccurate at worst
- Can create anxiety, especially for second language learners or students that are shy or anxious
- Requires significant scaffolding and/or teacher consults to improve their quality
- Hard to provide good feedback
Pedagogy Usage
Bucknell faculty was asked their best estimate for how often in the semester they used Student Presentations and the average class time it took.
Average Duration: 19 min (mode=10)
Remote Suggestions
This can be done similar to face-to-face presentations, just convereted to online, either live or pre-recorded. Presentations can be watched live or in advance, and students can discuss or comment afterwards either syncronously or remotely. If live, consider limiting the total screen time for watching to about an hour, perhaps breaking students up across different days/classes.
Resources for Additional Learning
Articles & Books
- Using performance criteria for assessing and improving student performance, J Arter, J McTighe ( 2001)
- Peer versus self assessment of oral business presentation performance. KS Campbell, DL Mothersbaugh (2012)