Is your scientific audience still listening?
Research suggests most people struggle to concentrate on presentations which are longer than 45 minutes. Can we fix this?
Image Credit: Wan San Yip, Unsplash
Lectures have been a time-tested way of conveying information to others for hundreds of years. Whether you’re an undergraduate student or a seasoned Professor attending a conference, participating in hour-long lectures is a classic staple fixture of academic life.
It might seem somewhat absurd, then, to question the effectiveness of such a long-standing method for imparting knowledge.
That is exactly the contradiction posed by a 2019 research project by the Sharp Corporation.[1] Surveying office workers partaking in meetings revealed a staggering 83% find themselves unable to concentrate effectively after meetings pass 45 minutes in length.
Given that the content of academic lectures can often be a good deal more complicated than your average office meeting, this raises worrying questions regarding audience engagement. In particular, scientific conferences generally stack multiple speakers into a time slot, easily boosting consecutive speech times to three-to-four hours.
Even if your research material is captivating for your audience, how can you be sure the information is being conveyed efficiently after the previous three hours of information-dense lectures? How can we fix this concentration problem without radically cutting down our presentations? These issues would seem to be a vital part of modern science communication that generally receives scant media coverage.
One answer comes in the form of carefully changing and improving the way we present our scientific content.
Use of “breather slides”, bespoke illustrations and captivating animations can help to make your presentations truly informative, entertaining and (most crucially) memorable.
For me, one of the clearest demonstrations of this was a conference at Warwick University I attended a number of years ago. The most memorable presentation I observed was from a Biologist; despite the field being completely alien to my own, I was able to understand the direction and ultimate goal of the research very easily. Slides were packed with colourful and detailed visual representations of the work being discussed. I walked away feeling quite excited about this person’s work despite having no professional investment in the topic.
A clear, calm and confident voice backed with excellent visual content always stands out immensely in a sea of opaque equations and hundreds of white PowerPoint pages.
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The efficient communication of scientific information is one of the central reasons I founded MM3D Graphics. If you would like assistance with the visual content of your next scientific presentation, contact us here for a discussion.
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References:
[1] - https://www.sharp.eu/sites/default/files/2021-09/19275%20Better%20Meetings%20Guide%20HR.pdf
