RESEARCH PROPOSAL POSTER SESSION

FOREST ECOSYSTEMS AND SOCIETY

First-year Graduate Student Proposed Research Posters

April 2013

Poster size: smallest dimension not more than 36” if using Student Multimedia Services (oregonstate.edu/is/mediaservices)

Poster Content:

Title and Presenter – Include your name, email contact and major professor

Research Question: State the general question your research will address

Background – Briefly put your research into context with regards to current knowledge on the topic and the importance of your question

Specific Questions and assumptions: State one or more specific questions to be addressed by the methods described below. These can be stated as postulates, succinct questions or hypotheses. – Note that these are NOT statistical hypotheses. State (non-null) scientific hypotheses. List the critical axioms or assumptions.

Methods – Describe the approach you will use to address each specific questions – give your response variable(s) and any explanatory variables, describe how the data are (or were) to be collected, study design (e.g., observational, survey, experiment), sampling plan and suggested analysis method. This is a minor part of the poster because it may not be well-developed at this point. But if you have ideas for it you should include them.

Interpretation – Provide the scope of inference. Provide the expected outcomes for your scientific hypotheses. Explain how the data you collect would ‘look’ in order to be interpreted relative to answering the specific question you posed above.

Importance – Explain how your thesis work will provide a significant contribution to the body of knowledge in your field.

Suggested Process:

  1. Discuss the proposed research with your major professor and make sure you are in agreement with regards to the specific questions, assumptions, methodsand interpretation.
  2. Develop a rough draft of your poster (reduced scale) and have it reviewed by your major professor and others who might provide useful feedback.
  3. Print a draft copy of the final poster on 11x17 paperbefore producing a full scale version. Have this reviewed by fellow students.
  4. Go to Student Multimedia Services (Valley Library, 2nd floor) to produce the final version.
  1. DO NOT PROCRASTINATE! Leave plenty of time to work out the wrinkles. Note the time to produce the poster that the Student Media Services requires as well.