Hi Trevor, 

Thanks for your reply; my apologies for the ambiguity. I'm looking specifically for evaluations for scientific conference presentations because I am creating one for an upcoming conference which I do intend to validate (and happily share with anyone who is following the question when I have some results). I'm trying to make an efficient evaluation that covers important aspects of the speaker and the topic that was selected for presentation since conference leadership often want that information for planning the next year's conference.

For speaker evaluations generically, the best validated example I found was The Competent Speaker, attached. It's way too long for lecture participants and included formal training before the evaluators completed the questionnaire for validation purposes. Response rates were reported for Cosmecon but they didn't validate the evaluation.

I'm basically looking for the conference evaluation holy grail: single questions that are highly correlated with the most important speaker qualities and topic interest qualities that are clear enough to not require explanation, all of which requires less than 1 min for people to fill out (so we can get better response rates). I'm not holding my breath...(But I'll take all suggestions!)

Thanks everyone for your help!

Hello Andrew....

Hope this may help you....

This is an example of an evaluation form ..... given to participants (attendees) after attending a Conference or Meeting on Dentistry.... either to fill out a printed form right at the end of the meeting...or prior to Downloading the certificate of attendance online.

EVALUATION                                                                                                                                The questions below are designed to help us make sure that future training and orientation sessions are as relevant as possible to your unique needs.Your candid response to help achieve this aim is much appreciated.  

• Excellent
• Very Good
• Good
• Fair
• Poor                                                                                                                                       

• Excellent Very Good Good Fair Poor

• Excellent Very Good Good Fair Poor                                                          

• Yes
• No
• Maybe

Comments:                                                                                                                     SPEAKER (name): R

Have a nice day...

Rocio León

Thanks Rocio!

Another aspect of medical conferences are poster presentations. These greatly outnumber oral presentations and are often 'evaluated' for an award of 'best poster'. How are these evaluated in any reliable way? There are some rubrics available, but to truly evaluate the 500+ posters that may be presented in a large scale conference session entails a lot of man-hours & effort. It therefore calls into doubt the value of the assessment, if the wider community cannot see how the 'good, the bad (and the ugly)' have been evenly judged against appropriate criteria.

Conference contributions take a back seat to formal publications which go through peer-review, but I see them as a different output, with different motivations and objectives. How can their evaluations be made more meaningful, and can these serve to further develop the way our presentations are appreciated by colleagues and peers? Is this an area where something along the lines of 'post publication review' could be adopted?

A simple approach is to have a voting box at each poster station, and to give all delegates a fixed number of "good poster" tokens to distribute among the available boxes. Prizes go to those with the most tokens.

Ian: I want to claim that this is overly simple and lacks any markers of validity ... but it is basically how we elect our governments!

@Nicholas, Yes. Now let's revise how we elect our governments.