Bio 152 students, please read:

As part of your work in Biology 152 you will be designing original hypotheses, designing experiments to test these hypotheses, and analyzing and presenting your results in the form of a research poster. The poster presentations from prior years will be useful to you in several ways as you work on developing your own projects:

1. First of all, they can provide you with background information that can help you with designing your own hypotheses and designing your own experiments.

   In some cases, the work of past students generated new insight and new questions, which could be the basis of your new hypotheses. In your project, you could take the next logical step in attempting to understand the research questions at hand.

This is how professional scientists make progress. Today's scientists are standing on the shoulders of the scientists who have gone before them, building on the results from previous research. For this reason, communication of one's research results to the scientific community is an essential part of science. Professional scientists communicate their research results to other scientists at scientific conferences (at the regional, national, or even international level) where they give talks and present research posters, and by publishing their results as research papers in scientific journals.

In other cases your predecessors may have had good hypotheses, but for one reason or another they were unable to adequately test the hypotheses. It might be that there was too much variability among replicates and sample sizes were too low, or there might have been unforseen methodological problems, or other circumstances. With the advantage of the insight gained by the student researchers who came before you, you might be able to tackle the same hypotheses again and do a better job of testing them than was possible previously.

2. Secondly, careful examination of these posters from past years can give you useful insight into what consititutes a good research poster. Though some of these research projects were carried out better than others, every one of these posters contains information that could be useful to help you design your new hypotheses. However, it is much easier to get this information from some posters than from others.

   Some posters are written better than others. A well-written poster will do a variety of things, including: (1) it will give useful background information to put the hypothesis into a bigger context, (2) it will clearly state the hypothesis that was tested and the rationale for this hypothesis, (3) it will explain how the hypothesis was tested, (4) it will present the results in tables, graphs, or diagrams, (5) it will verbally describe what happened (referring to the tables and graphs as it does so), (6) it will explain how results were analyzed, (6) it will tell whether or not the hypotheses were supported by the data, (7) it will discuss the significance of the results, and (8) it will describe future research that might be suggested by the results. Furthermore, (9) it will do all of the above using good sentence structure, good grammar and spelling, and with a logical progression of ideas.

   Some posters have better layout than others. A well laid out poster will be set up so that the eye automatically moves to the next logical place in the poster as you read through the poster. A well-designed poster will also not be lacking any essential parts, and the names of authors will be clearly displayed below a useful descriptive title.

   Some posters are easier to read than others. An easy to read poster will have a large easy to read font for the text as well as for all parts of tables and graphs. The print will be dark and crisp. Any handwritten or hand-drawn portions of the poster will be done neatly and legibly. Graphs will have logical choice of axes, and they will be adequately labeled. Diagrams and photos (if present) will be large enough to see clearly, they will be relevant, and they will be labeled so that the purpose of the diagram is clear.

   Some posters simply look nicer than others. Bright colors might seem like a good idea at first, but they can be distracting. Crooked and sloppy layout, and posters with random, unlabeled photos and diagrams can also be distracting (and sometimes hard to read). In contrast, simple poster layouts with judicious tasteful use of color and graphics and careful placement and alignment of items can be attractive and very effective.

   Please keep in mind that what matters most on a research poster is the information content and effective communication of that content. All features of the poster need to be designed to serve the ultimate goal of effective communication of your research results.

   So, as you read through the older posters, think about what makes some of these posters more effective than others, and when you put your own posters together toward the end of the semester, try to put into practice the lessons you learned about good poster design.

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