Backwards-faded scaffolding laboratory/presentation: end-of-semester poster session

Is everyone ready for today's poster session?

(This is the fourteenth and last Astronomy 210L laboratory at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA. This course is a one-semester, optional adjunct laboratory to the Astronomy 210 introductory astronomy lecture, taken primarily by students to satisfy their general education science transfer requirement.)

We'll be dividing you and the time today in laboratory into two parts.

During the first session, half of you will be presenting your posters. Nothing formal, just be accessible to answer questions and address comments from the non-presenting students.

If you are not presenting during the first session, you should circulate and look at every poster presented.

You will then fill out a session report, which asks you to critique two posters, and then select and explain the most important and the most confusing aspect from any of these first session posters...

...as well as a question you asked (and got an answer to) from these presenters. Even if nothing in particular interested or confused you, there should have been something that you at least found somewhat interesting and somewhat confusing.

Then for the second session, presenters and non-presenters will switch roles, and the new non-presenters will circulate and fill out their session reports.

EQUIPMENT
     (none)

BIG IDEA
     Attending a research poster session is an opportunity to personally engage colleagues in person about their findings, and to enrich each others' professional knowledge, perspective, and insights.

GOAL
     Students will alternate between presenting their independent research posters, and circulating and assessing others' research posters.

TASKS
1. Sign-up Sheet

1. If you have brought a completed research poster, sign up for your preference of first-half or second-half presentations. (Your instructor may move people near the bottom of either list to the other session in order to even out the number of presenters in each session.)
2. Tape your poster up in the space(s) available.

2. First Session

1. If you are presenting, stand by your poster, and answer questions and make clarifications for other attendees.
2. If you are observing, circulate among every first-session poster. Be sure to ask questions and make constructive comments to the presenters. After looking at all the first-session posters, complete a session report.

3. Second Session

1. If you are now observing, circulate among every second-session poster. Be sure to ask questions and make constructive comments to the presenters. After looking at all the second-session posters, complete a session report.
2. If you are now presenting, stand by your poster, and answer questions and make clarifications for other attendees.

(If you did not bring a poster to present today, you may fill out a session report for the first session, and another report for the second session.)

Session report (adapted from "Improving Student Engagement at Public Lectures: Assigning a Writing Task," Tim Slater and Gina Brissenden, http://astronomy101.jpl.nasa.gov/teachingstrategies/teachingdetails/?StrategyID=15; and Tim Slater, Stephanie Slater, Daniel J. Lyons, Engaging in Astronomical Inquiry, W.H. Freeman & Company, New York, 2010, p. 152):