Your Oral Presentation

In presenting your project to the judges at a science exposition, the following approaches have proven successful for many students.

1. Introduction
• State your name(s), age, school.
  
2. Acknowledgements
• Give credit to those whom you have contacted and to those who have helped you.
• Discuss any work done in the past pertaining to your project.
  
3. Purpose and Hypothesis
• State exactly what the investigation is attempting to discover.
• Make a prediction about the outcome.
• How did you get interested in this project? Give the reason for choosing it.
  
4. Background Information
• Background explanation for your project (to familiarize the judges), scope of your study, etc.
• This should be a summary of your review of literature. DO NOT read your entire research paper to the judges.
  
5. Procedure
• Be complete – do not leave out necessary details.
• Proceed in a logical manner, telling what you did step-by-step.
• Use visual aids: charts, pictures, graphs, etc. Point to your display, but stand aside when you do this.
• Explain how your apparatus was used. If you constructed it yourself, tell the judges you did, if not, give credit to those who helped you, Judges are more interested in your results and conclusions than in the apparatus.
  
6. Results (Data and Discussion)
• Explain both your controls and your experimental variables.
• Remember to use proper units of measure with your data.
• Point to graphs, charts, etc., when you refer you them.
  
7. Conclusion
• State in a concise and logical order the conclusions you can validly draw from the experimentation you have done and the data and/or observations obtained.
• Refer back to your hypothesis and tell if the results agree or disagree with it. Remember your hypothesis is simly an educated guess as to what your results may be and that the actual results may differ considerably.
• Admit any deficiencies or limitations in this regard – judges can respect this. This is an example of experimental error.
  
8. Future Plans
• Be sure to tell how you plan to continue your project.
9. Any Questions
• When you have finished, ask the judges if there are any questions, they would like to ask.
• When they ask you questions, think before you answer them. Answer slowly! If you do not know the answer say, “I really haven’t been concerned with this in my project, but it might be interesting to look into it.
• Thank them for any suggestions they may have for bettering your research.
  
10. Other Suggestions
• Speak slowly!
• Be forward but polite, dynamic, and above all interested in what you are doing.
• Remember that you are a salesperson and therefore your job is to sell your product to the judges. The judges are interested in your work – which is why they are judging you.
• Your presentation should not exceed 10 minutes.