Graduate Student Research-in-Progress Roundtable Series
Guidance for Presenters
2026 AERA Annual Meeting
Los Angeles, California

The Research-in-Progress Roundtable Series (RIPRS) sessions are intended for presentation of research projects that are not yet completed but are sufficiently far along for authors to share their work and contribute to a substantive discussion of the work at its current stage.

Roundtable sessions allow maximum interaction among presenters and with attendees. Accepted papers are grouped by research topics into tables with three-to-five papers per table, clustered around shared interests.

Each roundtable session will have a designated chair with relevant expertise to facilitate interaction and participation. Because the emphasis is on interaction, there will be no discussants or formal presentation of papers as in a paper session.

The Roundtable session will be 90 minutes long. Like other Annual Meeting roundtable sessions, the RIPRS will emphasize interaction and there are only brief presentations to stimulate discussion. Because of the emphasis on brief presentations and discussion, no audiovisual equipment or power source is provided at roundtable sessions.

Considering the size and configuration of the roundtables, using a laptop or tablet screen to share visual content may not be ideal. Presenters are encouraged to instead prepare handouts to distribute if a visual aid will support the discussion.

To prepare for your RIPRS Presentation consider the following:

• Think about how you may summarize your work in a few sentences and prepare this as your introduction. You may also want to share your plan for future stages of the work.
• Identify a few aspects of your project to share during the discussion and consider some questions to pose to your table.
• If you would like to include some visual aids, consider the most practical way to share the information, maybe a QR code, or some printed handouts.