Standards for Oral Presentations and Rough Drafts

Standards for Oral Presentations and Rough Drafts

of Economics 353 Papers

Economics 353 requires students to write a rough draft of their group paper and to make an oral presentation to the class on the project. Since some of you may not have made an oral presentation before, and probably have not presented original research often, this document gives you some idea of what you should say in your presentation and write in your paper in order to get the most out of it and get the best feedback for your final draft.

Any research project should have both a question and an answer. That is, there should be some interesting question which motivates the research, and at the end of the project some kind of conclusion should have been reached about that question. The question should be economic in nature rather than purely statistical. That is, the question should concern either some matter of economic theory (for example, are the returns to scale in electric power generation?) or of economic policy (should electric power be regulated as a natural monopoly?) rather than only statistical matters (is the coeffecient on output negative?) In both your paper and your oral presentation, you want to clearly explain five things:

1) What research question am I asking in this project?

2) What analysis am I going to do to find the answer?

3) What were the results of that analysis?

4) What is the answer to the question I originally asked?

5) Why is that answer interesting or important to an economist?

Your grade on the project as a whole will depend on the answers to these questions and on your ability to clearly express them in the presentation and in the final paper. A good research project is one that asks an interesting question, takes the correct (or at least a correct) approach to finding out the answer, correctly identifies the answer, and explains what is meaningful about that answer. Econometric technique is important for the analysis and for finding the answer, but it is not the only part of the substance that matters. You should use the econometric methods that are the right ones for the question you are asking, not ones that seem sophisticated or complex. If complex methods are needed, then use them; if simple OLS is best for your question, then use that. Choosing the right regressions on the right data, and being able to draw the right economic conclusions from those regressions, is an equally important part of the work of the project.

The second part of the task is to clearly communicate the question and the answer to your audience. This is important for two reasons. First, you want to make sure that everything you learned from your project is shared with as many people as possible. Second, for both the rough draft and the oral presentation, the more clearly you can present the material, the more effectively your audience can make suggestions for improving it for the final draft. If the rough draft is not written clearly, then a problem with the research may not be apparent until it's too late to do anything to fix it. When I grade the final papers and the oral presentations, I will be looking primarily to see if the answers to the five questions above have been presented clearly and precisely. Clarity is important to make sure that everyone understands what you are intending to do and what it means. Precision is important because you want to make sure that all of the implications of your work are brought out, and so that people will not draw incorrect conclusions from the paper or the presentation.