Need to make a presentation soon? Work on your Powerpoint skills!
Scientist don’t seem to know about this and haven’t learned how to avoid this pitfall.
They also often turn away from the audience towards the projection - more than three times per minute - while maintaining eye contact is one of the important elements of a good presentation.
Especially young scientists suffer from speaking anxiety and use the PowerPoint slides as speaking-notes to support themselves instead of as a support for the audience. They should be trained in effective PowerPoint use and helped to overcome their speaking anxiety in other ways.
These are results of the PhD research of Brigitte Hertz in her thesis Spotlight on the presenter. A study into presentations of conference papers with PowerPoint in September, to be defended on September 9th at Wageningen University.