Presentations should address at least these basic questions:

  • What are the most important pieces of background information that set the context of the paper ?
  • What key scientific question(s) were the investigators trying to answer ?
  • What methods did they use ? What are the important advantages and disadvantages of these methods ?
  • What was the design of the experiment(s) ?
  • What results did they obtain ?
  • Did they succeed in answering the original questions ? Are there broader implications of their findings ?
  • How might you improve upon the experiments ?

    To focus the discussion, choose 2-4 figures that demonstrate the major findings of the paper.

    It may be helpful to display these figures on the screen via Powerpoint or a transparency.

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