Effective Ways to Use Presentation Tools for Teaching and Learning

Like most professors, I research, teach, and serve. Because I work at a Research 1 university, most of my effort focuses on research … which I then communicate through teaching and act upon by serving others. Most of my research focuses on the question, What are effective ways to use digital technologies for teaching and learning?

I’ve narrowed the question in recent years to What does research indicate are effective ways to use presentation tools for teaching and learning?

Why? Because PowerPoint, Google Slides, Pear Deck, Keynote, Nearpod, and Prezi are ubiquitous in many school and university classrooms worldwide. I’ve only come across a few cases in North America where a presentation tool was not used at some point during a lesson, unit, module, lecture, project, activity, class, workshop, seminar, course, assembly, meeting, or conference. Even in remote Kazakh oblasts, outlying Afghan provinces, and isolated Pacific islands, presentation tools are used. I haven’t found hard data on educational usage worldwide, but the number of slides produced daily by educators must be enormous.

Unfortunately, many of the presentation slides created by teachers, professors, publishers, and students are not designed for effective learning and remembering. They crowd words on a slide, display pixelated images, mix colors that clash, and ply backgrounds that veil. Few know how to use design principles like proximity, contrast, contiguity, and affordance to layout a slide, storyboard an activity, pitch an argument, prototype an idea, or model a process. The scholarship and craftsmanship of information design have not been a part of their preparation or ongoing professional development.

That’s why I became interested in effective ways to use presentation tools for teaching and learning. There is a wide gap between what is known and what is done. So I review recent research, conduct my own, and communicate the results. I focus on presentation technologies as used by university professors, school teachers, and K-16 students when teaching and learning academic content (e.g., physics, biology, literature, geometry, history).

For example, what is the most effective way to use a diagram in PowerPoint that depicts photosynthesis when teaching 12-year-olds?

• Show the full, detailed diagram and then talk through parts of the process? (whole-to-part)
• Show each part of the process, progressively adding detail until the full diagram is visible? (part-to-whole)
• Show a simplified version of the diagram and sequentially add complexity? (simple-to-complex)
• Show multiple diagrams that represent the process in various ways? (cross-case-analysis)
• Other approaches?

For the last year, I’ve been reading research, attending conferences, studying designers, shadowing presentationists, listening to coaches, applying for grants, and practicing what I learn with students and colleagues. I feel like an entrepreneur in an incubator, accelerating the development of an early-stage program of research.

Dr. Hartman presents research on the effective use of presentation tools to faculty and graduate students at the National University of Uzbekistan in the capital city of Tashkent

My research to date follows three lines:

1. One describes the presentation advice conveyed to school-age presenters. What are the guidelines, techniques, and principles communicated in public speaking books for tweens and teens? The preliminary analysis of 74 trade books indicates there is very little communicated about using visual aids like PowerPoint when educating, persuading, or entertaining an audience. To my surprise, a few of the older books (from the 1960s) convey more about using visual aids (e.g., overhead projectors, paper charts) than current ones.
2. Another line involves creating an information design curriculum that university faculty can use to teach new teachers so the use of presentation software is more effective in classrooms. With funding from several small grants and the goodwill of colleagues from the Presentation Guild, the curriculum could be ready for use in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia in about a year. The most interesting part of this work has been learning how cultural views of ‘effectiveness’ interact with evidence-based design principles. For instance, in some educational contexts a wall of 100 or more words on a slide signals to students that a professor has been very thorough in their preparation, that the content is more reliable, and that reading aloud all the words on the slide reinforces learning and remembering. In other contexts, a similar wall of words is perceived as poor preparation, the inclusion of unimportant information, and lazy instruction when read aloud word-for-word.
3. And the third line of research reviews the scholarly literature related to presenting. What evidence supports the principles often cited for effective teaching and learning with presentation software? It’s been fascinating to learn that some of the principles valued by presentation professionals don’t always apply to effective design with presentation software. For example, the evidence to date indicates that the ‘picture superiority effect’ can indeed be a powerful principle for designing visual communication via slides … but not all the time. There are conditions when pictures blur, blunt, or befuddle clear communication … even when they are seemingly-relevant high-resolution SVG images. Except for the blog by Geetesh Bajaj on Word Count: 1000?, I have yet to read or hear a presentation or professional talk about the subtle and nuanced conditions where the use of pictures (or other types of images) can be ineffective. I’ll keep looking and listening.

In all, it feels like I have the best job in the world. I can’t wait to wake up every morning. I spend all day, every day, working with brilliant colleagues and bright students to solve some of the world’s most challenging educational problems. And right now, one of the most vexing problems on my mind is: What does research indicate are effective ways to use presentation tools for teaching and learning?

Douglas K. Hartman is Professor of Technology & Human Learning in the College of Education at Michigan State University. His research focuses on the effective use of digital technologies for teaching and learning. He teaches graduate courses on technology, learning, language and literacy in global contexts. He also directs the university’s #1 ranked online graduate program in teaching and curriculum (2023 US News & World Report Rankings). Dr. Hartman’s recent grants have funded projects on the effective use of multimedia technologies with faculty at Asian, European and North American universities.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

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