PSYb2671 Psychology Oral Presentation Skills Enhancement

Fakulta sociálních studií
podzim 2026
Rozsah
0/2. 3 kr. Ukončení: k.
Vyučující
Pavel Borovička, MSc. (přednášející)
Mgr. Anna Kubelková (přednášející)
Garance
Pavel Borovička, MSc.
Katedra psychologie – Fakulta sociálních studií
Dodavatelské pracoviště: Katedra psychologie – Fakulta sociálních studií
Rozvrh
Po 16:00–17:40 U33
Předpoklady
PSYb1020 Psychologie osobnosti
Ability to communicate fluently in English.
Omezení zápisu do předmětu
Předmět je určen pouze studentům mateřských oborů.

Předmět si smí zapsat nejvýše 30 stud.
Momentální stav registrace a zápisu: zapsáno: 28/30, pouze zareg.: 0/30
Mateřské obory/plány
Anotace

POPSE is a practical course centered on delivering psychology-related presentations in front of a crowd, either online or in person. It can be useful to students who will soon have to present a seminar paper, defend a thesis, or explain what they do to someone outside the field, and who want to gain hands-on experience with such endeavors.


Twelve sessions alternate their focus between student presentations and standard lecture sessions. In the six lecture sessions, we work through what makes a talk hold together, poster design, visual aids, verbal and nonverbal delivery, and how to open and close a presentation. In the six presentation sessions, you speak, while the lecturers and students listen and provide constructive feedback.  Throughout these 12 sessions, the greatest emphasis is placed on developing a personal delivery style that suits the speaker and makes them more comfortable in public speaking situations.


Everyone is required to prepare a five-minute talk on a psychological study or concept of their choice, including slides. Each presentation session also opens with a voluntary impromptu block, for anyone eager to practice thinking on their feet. 


Importantly, nothing here is graded; instead, you get feedback from your classmates and the lecturers. Another core emphasis within the module is to provide students with a room where it is safe to try something and have it not quite work.


The course is taught in English, and every session runs in a FSS lecture room and online at the same time.

Výstupy z učení

By the end of the course, students will be better able to:


  • Prepare and deliver a five-minute talk on a psychological study or concept, with slides, to an audience either in the room or online.
  • Structure a talk so that an audience can follow it from start to finish, with an opening that earns attention and a closing that leaves something behind.
  • Design slides and a poster that support what is being said rather than compete with it.
  • Adapt the same material for an academic audience and for people outside the field, and explain why the two versions differ.
  • Use voice and body deliberately, including pace, pauses, volume, eye contact, posture, and gesture.
  • Address questions from an audience, including ones they did not see coming, and say honestly when they do not know the answer.
  • Give another speaker feedback specific enough to act on, and receive feedback on their own work without dismissing it or taking it personally.
  •  Reflect on their own development as a speaker, including how they handle nerves and what kind of delivery suits them, and identify what they intend to keep working on.

Klíčová témata

The psychology of the speaker
Fixed and growth mindset (Dweck, 2006). Self-efficacy and its four sources (Bandura, 1977). Communication apprehension (McCroskey, 1977). Competence and autonomy in self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000).


Attention and memory in the audience
Cognitive load (Sweller, 1988). Principles of multimedia learning (Mayer, 2021). Picture superiority and dual coding (Paivio, 1986). Serial position, primacy and recency (Murdock, 1962). The peak-end rule (Kahneman et al., 1993). Curiosity and the information gap (Loewenstein, 1994).


Structure and rhetoric
Ethos, pathos and logos (Aristotle, trans. 2007). The rhetorical situation (Bitzer, 1968). Hook, bridge and map. Advance organizers (Ausubel, 1960). Circular closure.


Delivery
Volume, rate, pitch, pauses and articulation. Eye contact, posture, gesture, movement and use of space. The 7-38-55 claim and what it does not mean (Mehrabian, 1971). Power posing as a case study in embodied cognition, pop psychology and replication (Carney et al., 2010).


Communicating psychology beyond the field
Academic and lay register. Plain-language summaries. The easiness effect (Scharrer et al., 2012). Epistemic trustworthiness in expertise, integrity and benevolence (Hendriks et al., 2015). Communicating uncertainty without losing trust (König et al., 2024).



Practice and feedback
Deliberate practice (Ericsson et al., 1993). Specificity and actionability in constructive feedback. Reflective self-assessment.

Přístupy, postupy a metody používané ve výuce

The taught material builds over the semester, while presentations run alongside it from the second session onward, so students encounter the concepts and the practice together rather than sitting through a term of theory before anyone is allowed to speak. 


Presenting early means giving a talk that is entirely your own, with nothing yet to imitate, which makes it the clearest record of where you started and the one we come back to in December. Presenting later means arriving with several sessions of watching behind you. We feel that having both positions is the best compromise, given the limited time in the module and the large number of students, often with varying levels of public-speaking experience.


Below, you can find a more specific look into the values and structure of the module:


Peer feedback is the main channel
We believe that the most valuable lessons in our module come from classmates rather than from the lecturers. We actively encourage students to structure actionable, critical feedback for one another, with every prepared talk closed by feedback from us that gathers up what the room has said and adds whatever we feel could also be useful. We stress the importance of an attentive audience, and students' engagement in this sense is treated as part of the work and described as such in the first session.


Training Ground
As stated earlier in the annotation, nothing in the module is graded; that is very much a deliberate design decision rather than artificial leniency. We are firmly convinced that there is no single correct way to give a talk, since what works depends on the speaker, the material, and the room. The prepared speech in our module is not expected to be a project resembling the standard of a finished conference presentation (although we do not discourage such ambitions).


It is meant to show the students what to work on.


Voluntary and student-led elements
Participation in the impromptu block that opens each presentation session is purely optional. The prompts (e.g., "Why have you chosen to study psychology? ") are prepared each week by a different student rather than by us, so both the challenge and its content come from the current cohort. It is important to note that the impromptu prompts are not focused on specific psychological topics or their critical analysis. The impromptu block is not meant to resemble an exam, but rather to provide students with a chance to gain extra hands-on experience speaking in front of a crowd.


Discussion rather than a lecture
The taught sessions are handled discursively wherever the material allows, in small groups, based on our belief that discussing a theory is closer to practicing communication than simply listening to us talk about it.


Reflective self-assessment
Students write a short evocative essay before the module has had a chance to work on them and a self-reflective one at the end. The students are encouraged to reflect on their points and aspirations from the evocative essay when structuring the self-reflective, so that progress is judged against their own starting point rather than interpersonal comparison.


Critical appraisal alongside practice
Where a foundational source has been seriously qualified by later work of which we are aware, both are read. Our students are studying psychology, and a course that asks them to take its own evidence on trust would be teaching one thing and demonstrating another.

Způsob ověření výstupů z učení a požadavky na ukončení

Again, nothing in the module is graded, so the outcomes are verified by work that is done and witnessed rather than by a mark. The subject is completed with a credit (zápočet).


Requirements for completion:


  • One prepared 5-minute talk with slides on a psychological study or concept of the student's own choosing, delivered live in the assigned session, either in the room or online. Completing it means delivering it.
  • The evocative essay, maximum 500 words, to be submitted before the second session of the module.
  • The self-reflective essay, maximum 500 words, to be submitted around the last session of the module.
  • Attendance at ten of the twelve sessions. Any absence is excused by providing a reason, and there is no cap on how many can be excused, which we offer on the understanding that it will not be abused.


The one session that cannot be missed is the student's own presentation date, and if something unavoidable comes up, we move that slot to the final session.


Impromptu speaking
The impromptu block is voluntary and carries no consequence either way. It is not a condition of completion, and it is not assessed.


Declaring the use of AI tools
Where an AI tool has shaped the content of a talk or its slides beyond spelling and formatting, we ask for a line on the final slide saying so. In this sense, we follow Masaryk University's position that such tools are a normal part of academic work, provided their use is transparent, and the author remains responsible for the result.

Náhradní absolvování

Every session runs in the room and online at the same time, and online attendance counts in full. A student on an exchange, or one who cannot travel to the faculty for medical, caring, or family reasons, can therefore take the module in its ordinary form from wherever they happen to be. 


Absence
Any absence is excused once the reason has been given to the lecturers, and no concrete limit is set on the number of excused absences. However, where a student misses a substantial part of the semester, marking them as "completing" the module cannot be considered either feasible or fair to the other students; in such cases, the credit may not be awarded, and the subject might need to be enrolled in again in a following semester in accordance with the Study and Examination Regulations. Such cases are considered individually and by prior arrangement with the lecturers.


The prepared talk
Where the assigned date becomes no longer feasible, the slot moves to a later presentation session (based on communication with the lecturers). A student who cannot present at any point in the semester, in the room or online, is better served by taking the module in a later run than by an alternative that would omit the very purpose of the module. Where circumstances are uncertain, students are to contact the lecturers early, and we will look for a way through.


The essays
Both are written work with deadlines, not to be missed. The evocative essay is the one where timing carries the most meaning, since it is meant to record where a student stood before the module.

Odkaz a informace vyučujících
Mgr. Pavel Borovička -  borovicka.pavel@mail.muni.cz
Mgr. Anna Kubelková - kubelkova@mail.muni.cz 

Studijní opora
https://is.muni.cz/auth/el/fss/podzim2026/PSYb2671/index.qwarp
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