Considerations for Effective Use of PowerPoint in Teaching
Introduction
I’ve been thinking a lot about how PowerPoint (‘PPT’) can be used effectively to optimise teaching.
In this article, I’ll analyse common issues associated with the deployment of PPT and why this subject deserves attention. I’ll examine relevant literature and share observations from peers about what they associate as poor use of PPT. Once I outline the issues, then I’ll share guidance on how to deploy PPT effectively. The ultimate goal of this article is to equip educators with a list of principles that they can use to facilitate better presentations and more impactful delivery.
Issues with PowerPoint
In education, the lecture has been regarded as “an accomplishment — bringing together a very particular constellation of speaker, space, technology, audience and attention” (Crang, 2003, p. 242, quoted in (Craig and Amernic, 2006). In this setting, the role of the lecturer and the technology they use deserves attention. Lecturers are often subject matter experts but may not have thought about effective use of PPT. This can result in the creation of decks that are presenter oriented rather than learner oriented. For example, lecturers sometimes use their decks to guide them in terms of what to say throughout the lesson. This limits the use of the deck for learner comprehension.
Another common issue it too much content on a slide. (Duarte, 2008) writes that if slide contains more than 75 words, it is a document. When this happens, an audience will either read the slide or listen to the speaker. They cannot do both as listening and reading are conflicting activities. At best, if there is a lot of text on a slide, learners will read ahead. At worst, they will tune out. The phrase “Death by PowerPoint” is used to describe this situation.
Too many words on a slide can also result in it becoming a teleprompter for the lecturer who may find themselves turning their back on their audience and reading. This places the deck, rather than the lecturer as the centre of attention.
However, when a presentation is delivered well, PPT can be an effective communications tool. One of the most famous PPT presentations is Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. After his defeat in 2000 US presidential election, Gore edited a slide show he had created years earlier and began featuring the slide show in presentations about global warming. When film Producer Laurie David saw a 10-minute version of Gore’s slide show, she described it as the most powerful and clear explanation of global warming she had ever seen (Booth, 2006). She was so inspired that she turned it into a critically acclaimed film.
Why I’m interested in PowerPoint
I work in a role that involves creating lots of training materials. I also often support subject matter experts (SMEs) to create learning materials. For this reason, I’d like to create a resource to support SMEs to create learner centric decks.
I value taking a learner centred approach to teaching. This is sometimes seen as being in opposition to the use of PPT. This article seeks to challenge the view that PPT is presenter focused by examining how it can be deployed as a pedagogical tool to support the construction rather than just the transmission of knowledge. After all, despite all of the criticism, PPT is only a delivery system for presenting information to learners (Clark, 2008). In my view, it is a collective misuse of PPT that informs this criticism. When it is used well, it can support a presenter to share their message and support learners to build new knowledge.
While I refer specifically to PPT, in practice I seek to create a list of principles that can be applied to “slideware”, a term for presentation programs that facilitate the sharing of ideas via imagery, text, audio and video.
How I came up with these principles
Examining PPT pedagogical best practice requires looking past the tool and analysing literature in the domains of cognition, typography and visual communications. This analysis can be synthesised into a set of principles that educators can use to create learner focused PPTs.
I also asked professional peers for observations of good and bad PPT practice. Responses cited poor use of transitions, too many bullet points, lack of clarity regarding learning outcomes, lack of contrast between text colour and slide backgrounds, overcrowded slides and presenters reading their decks. These observations are consistent with issues cited in the literature. For example, (Tufte, 2006) criticises PPT for the replacement of complex material with over simplified bullet points, low-resolution imagery and restrictive templates.
Observations were also made about decks that look like documents. (Davies, 2021), writes that “Bad presentations are normally bad because they should have been documents. And vice versa”.
PowerPoint Design Principles
The following guidance is based on a review of academic and professional literature.
1. Practice design, not decoration
“Like a poor radio signal, slides are susceptible to interference and noise” (Duarte, 2008).
Design is not about making aesthetically pleasing slides. It is about being an advocate for the person who you are presenting to and making sure that design is consonant with what you are trying to communicate.
Well-designed slides contain very little text, use large font, have one image per slide and one key idea or theme per slide. These ideas are covered in more detail in the following sections.
Maintain a consistent theme throughout the presentation. However, avoid pre-made PPT templates which may limit verbal and spatial reasoning (Tufte, 2006).
2. Put the audience first
“Seek first to understand, then to be understood” (Covey, 2004).
In education and in marketing, it is important to start with the beneficiary. In marketing the beneficiary is the customer. In education, it is the student. Being clear on who the beneficiary is will bring structure to a presentation.
Educators can align their decks with learner requirements by creating personas that represent learners. One tool that educators can modify to understand their audience is the Value Proposition Canvas (VPC), created by (Osterwalder et al., 2014). The VPC (Below— Example Value Proposition Canvas for education) is a tool that can help ensure that a product (or lesson) is positioned around what the beneficiary (or student) values and needs. Educators can add their completed VPC at the start of their deck to help them customise their content. This slide is not something to be projected.
3. Organise your thoughts
Decks should start by articulating the learning objectives of the session. This offers context to the audience (Davies, 2021).
Educators should practice storyboarding their material before they present it. In this sense, PPT is a very useful tool as you can look at slide sorter view to organise thoughts and ideas.
4. Present one theme or idea per slide
To support clarity, each slide should contain one overarching thought or idea (Duarte, 2008; Reynolds, 2012; Davies, 2021). In practice, this means no more than one chart or one image per slide. Multiple charts or images on a slide can obscure the point and frustrate cognition.
5. Utilise the Rule of Three
It is difficult to find conclusive research that indicates that the human brain is neurologically predisposed to the number three and yet throughout storytelling, advertising and management communications, it appears all the time (Davies, 2021). Try to break lessons or even sections of lessons into three segments.
The Rule of Three can also be used to make a message more memorable through repetition. One of the most effective tools that can be used is three step approach: Tell them what you are going to tell them; Tell them; Tell them what you told them (Simon, 2016).
6. Use PowerPoint as a visual aid
“Vision trumps all other senses” (Medina, 2009).
An advantage of PPT is that educator’s do not need to rely on just their own words to get a point across. PPT allows educators to utilise orality, visuality and text. According to (Mayer and Moreno, 2005), it is natural for people to simultaneously pay attention to verbal and visual communication.
This recommendation is backed up by the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning which states that “people learn more deeply from words and pictures than from words alone” (Mayer and Moreno, 2005). This theory proposes three assumptions. First, there are two separate channels (auditory and visual) for processing information. Second, each channel has a limited capacity. Third, meaningful learning is an active process that involves cognitive processing to build connections between pictorial and verbal information to make sense of incoming information and integrating it with prior knowledge. The key design principle is to link verbal with pictorial information to reduce cognitive and optimise learning.
7. Make slides that reinforce words, not repeat them
“It is better to present an explanation in words and pictures than solely in words” (Mayer and Moreno, 2005).
PPT is just a piece of software that can display imagery and text. A key d esign principle is to avoid what (Parker, 2001) calls “triple delivery” where the same text is on the screen, spoken aloud and printed on handouts. When this is done, auditory, reading and visual processing are all downgraded. PPT decks should not be designed to replace reading or listening to lectures.
8. Limit the number of words used per slide
“If there are too many words, the instructor risks being relegated from a centre stage role, to that of an incidental stagehand” (Craig and Amernic, 2006).
(Duarte, 2008) says that if a slide has more than 75 words, it is a document. If this happens, reduce the number of words on the slide or consider whether the deck should be a document.
Slides with less than 75 words but more than 50 can still end up becoming a teleprompter (Duarte, 2008). This is because text on slides can serve as a crutch for presenters who may have designed the slides for themselves and not their students (Figure — Know the difference between a document, a teleprompter and a presentation).
(Gallo, 2014) says that the average PPT presentation slide has 40 words. She points out that TED presentations, considered the best presentations in the world rarely contain 40 words. Seth Godin recommends no more than six words per slide (Godin, 2007).
In practice, the number of words used will be based on the material being presented and to whom the material is being presented. Decide whether you are creating a document to be read or a PPT to be presented.
9. Limit use of bullet points
(Duarte, 2008) refers to the “3 second rule” which states that presentations are a glance media and so messages on slides should be processed by the audience within 3 seconds.
While Seth Godin recommends a maximum of 6 words per slide, (Davies, 2021) goes a bit further and says 6 words per line with no more than three bullet points.
Of course, if making use of bullet points, speakers should be aware of the natural tendency to read ahead. A key design principle if you must deploy bullet points is to use progressive disclosure. This means that a bullet point should only be revealed on the slide at the moment it is being discussed. This requires the animation feature in PowerPoint.
10. Use headlines, not headings
(Davies, 2021) points out that headings are often used in place of headlines. Headings are fine to use when the deck is being created to demarcate sections however when it comes to presenting, remove cognitive friction by placing the most important information in the slide at the top of the slide, rather than a description of the slide, followed by the most important information. See Figure below — Make the material easier to consume by using headlines, not headings.
11. Make slides accessible by making them readable
Words used in slides should be readable at a glance. Research by (Sawyer et al., 2017) indicates that larger, wider, and capitalised text outperforms smaller, narrow, lowercase text. (Davies, 2021) recommends using at least 30-point, left-aligned text in a sans-serif font.
Emphasis such as the use of italics or bold should be used sparingly. If emphasis is being used, stick to one form throughout the deck (Davies, 2021). (Jones, 2003) recommends trying to avoid having more than 6 lines of text in a slide.
12. Make slides accessible with effective use of colour
Colour can help direct attention (Phillips, David JP, 2014). Choose contrasting colours to make the deck readable however avoid using red and green combinations. The most common form of colour blindness prevents separation of reds and greens (Jones, 2003).
Working with colour starts with choosing a background. (Duarte, 2008) recommends that backgrounds should have no design pattern. (Davies, 2021) and (Phillips, David JP, 2014) recommend not using a white background as the glare can steal attention from the speaker. Also, students with dyslexia might find high contrast between text and background (such as black text on white background) difficult to read (Wilkins, 2019).
13. Support multisensory experiences by utilising relevant imagery
Napoleon Bonaparte shared a universal truth when he said that “a good sketch is better than a long speech”.
If PPT is to be used as a visual aid, it makes sense to make use of imagery. Educators need to think carefully about how to transfer their ideas into engaging images. The point is to make your idea easier to understand and remember rather than to decorate slides. Imagery can also help learners recall information when it is delivered in a combination of pictures, oration and text. This is based on dual coding theory, cited by (Richard Mayer and Moreno, 2005).
14. Use realistic photography
(Duarte, 2008) suggests creating a library of re-usable photographs that fit well with each other. This includes thinking carefully about photographs that are consistent with the idea being presented in a slide. Further, she recommends exercising caution when choosing stock photos which can be unrealistic. The design principle is to present photography that favors realism over “staged metaphorical approximation” (Duarte, 2008). Finally, imagery should be context appropriate and should reflect the audience’s culture or ethnicity.
15. Use diagrams to explain relationships and interaction
Diagrams are useful for explaining relationships and interaction. If you can construct a diagram via multiple slides, you can imbue context, sequence and association (Duarte, 2008).To facilitate construction of new knowledge and reduce cognitive load, it can be useful to utilise progressive disclosure and build diagrams via multiple slides. Progressive disclosure is a user experience term that describes moving a person through an experience in a way that escalates from simple to more complex, showing only the necessary and relevant information at any single point in time (Lanning, 2019). An example of progressive disclosure is in Figure 4 — Example of progressive disclosure. Colour is added to each subsequent slide to draw attention to the relevant part of the diagram.
16. Data visualisations should be clear. If necessary, provide charts in hard copy
Slides are not always a good medium for showing complex data. If learners need to examine data, graphs should be distributed in hardcopy and referenced. A key design principle is that data visualisations should be clear, accurate and visually appealing (Tufte, 1997). Educators can utilise several tactics to bring clarity to data. First, they can utilise progressive disclosure or they can use colour to steer attention to the data they are discussing (Figure — When using complex graphs, highlight what’s important). Colour should not be used to decorate data.
Alternatively, educators may choose to share the relevant numbers rather than the full visualisation. For example, when Bono spoke at TED in 2013, he only presented single numbers on screen. When he said that extreme poverty had been halved since the year 2000, the slide read, “Extreme Poverty Halved” (Bono, 2013).
(Tufte, 1997) also recommends removing what he calls “chart junk”. Chart junk refers to all visual elements that are not necessary to comprehend the information represented on the graph, or that distract the viewer from this information. Chart junk can include grid lines, unnecessary text, inappropriate fonts, pictures surrounding text or 3D components (Tufte, 1997). Figure — “Chart Junk” shows how clutter, an overuse of colour and too much text can make a chart become incomprehensible in a slide.
17. Conclusion
Getting a message out of one brain and into another is hard work. The goal for educators should be to utilise the interdependence between their ideas, their slides and their delivery to maximise comprehension. This leads to three concluding points.
First, PPT is not a substitute for a lecture. A good deck should only be useful when consumed along with a lecture.
Second, PPT should not replace independent reading. This also means that slides are not a place to condense knowledge into bullet points.
Third, well designed slides should not act as a visual crutch for the presenter. It takes time to craft learner centred slides. (Duarte, 2008) suggests that it can take 36–90 hours to create a 30-slide deck. This includes 3 hours of rehearsal. After all, the finished product is not a beautiful PPT deck. The finished product is you presenting alongside the slides.
References
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