While the debate rages on over the value of PowerPoint in teaching,* we might as well consider how to use it most effectively when we do use it.
Everyone agrees that PowerPoint is almost sure to be used badly if we’re not thoughtful about it. For example, I may want to paste into my slide an entire cladogram of echinoderms or an entire schematic of US governmental structure, but you probably don’t want me to. You probably want me to show you just the amount you can take in at one time, in a font you can read. These are some fundamental principles of PowerPoint use that are available in any “Tips and Tricks” list.
But what about for those of us who have figured out the fundamentals? What’s next? One promising way to improve the effectiveness of PowerPoint presentations when teaching is to use the “assertion-evidence structure” advocated at Penn State. This structure calls for a sentence at the top of the slide that makes an assertion, and an image (a photo, a figure, a diagram) underneath that provides visual evidence for the assertion. The goal is to offer a piece of information (the assertion) and help the student remember it by showing a relevant image (the evidence). The folks at Penn State point out that traditional use of PowerPoint pushes the presenter to turn every idea into a bulleted list, which often doesn’t match the content or thinking processes of our disciplines. The assertion-evidence structure allows the presenter to represent a logical progression of thoughts in a way that the presenter – and other professionals in the field – probably actually think about the topic. And it may help students connect the dots in that logical progression.
The assertion-evidence model is described in more detail here (watch the slide show about smelling by dogs – it’s kind of slow to start) and here. Perhaps even more useful is a few examples of “before and after” slides.
Is the “assertion-evidence” structure useful to you as an instructor? What do you see as its strengths or weaknesses? Do you have ideas for improvement of this model?
* Consider some of the insightful concerns from the “Death by PowerPoint” crowd, e.g., Garber 2001, Tufte 2006.
Citations
Garber, A. 2001. Death by PowerPoint. Small Business Computing. Accessed at: http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/biztools/article.php/684871
Tufte, E. R. 2006. The cognitive style of PowerPoint: Pitching out corrupts within. 2nd ed. Graphics Press.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
As a chemistry major who has had to take many math, chemistry, and physics classes I have mostly had a negative experience with powerpoint lectures. I cannot speak for other sciences or other disciplines outside of science. There are several reasons why I find power point lectures difficult. First, a math based class often presents derivations and detailed step by step procedures to solve problems. As a student it is very helpful to not only hear the instructor explain the process but also see the instructor write it up himself in the board one symbol at a time, and write it down yourself as a note taker. This three layered process to learning has the best effects to my retention and understanding of the problems. Power points tend to emphasize the auditory and the visual but not the kinesthetic modality of learning. Furthermore, the visual presentation is different on a power point because information is posted up in large bulks instead of seeing the symbols written up there on the board one at a time. See all that information up there makes it more difficult for the note taker to keep up and ends up making the student less active. Finally, instructors tend to skip over the “easy steps” when they present power points and don’t realize that often time it is these “easy steps” that end up stumping the student. Power points are designed to report and articulate information, not to instruct in my opinion. To be a truly effective science teacher an instructor must be actively involved with not only his mouth and his clicker finger but his whole body. A more active teacher can better SHOW students how to do problems effectively instead of just “talk” to students about solving problems. As I say this, I recall that there was an instructor who seemed to have found a fairly good solution to this problem. He would have the students buy a power point packet which was a copy of his power point lectures but with a bunch of blank spaces on it. The students would then fill in the blanks as the instructor presented his derivations on the power point. He wouldn’t hesitate getting the chalk out though and expanding on the problems as needed, however. Once again this is strictly a problem for science and math classes and perhaps less of a problem for other types of classes in different subjects.
Alan,
I particularly agree with your point about the effect of presenting large blocks of information at once instead of in smaller bits, seriatum. Especially for disciplines in which the order of data and steps matters greatly, such as math, it seems like some kind of demonstration would be essential.
~Rosemary
At first glance I really like the idea “assertion-evidence structure”. It strikes me as straight-forward and logical. It seems tricky though when I think of students’ attention. If you give them the main focus/finding of your argument right of the bat, I wonder if you will lose them while you are presenting the evidence (since they already know the ending). This is of course only a problem if the evidence you are providing is more than one slide. Maybe the trick is to use this structure when the assertion is fairly exciting or phrased in a way that doesn’t tell the whole story. That way you have their attention and hopefully the students are eager to learn the evidence or the rest of the story. I think PowerPoint can be a great tool but it requires a lot of creative effort. I feel like the best PowerPoint presentations I have seen required a great deal of effort and original thought regarding the best/most visually appealing way to present information. It was almost never bullet points. Thanks for sharing the “assertion-evidence model”. I always appreciated some visual reminders throughout slides as an undergraduate and I would like to get better at implementing them myself. I realized while I was preparing for my first brown bag talk last year that I was getting a little carried away with the ClipArt which really isn’t the point of this type of model. Again, I think it takes some real time and thought to do well.
~Olivia
Powerpoint presentations, like anything else presented in the classroom, can either be an effective mechanism of engaging your audience or loosing them. There is an assumption that because you are simply using a powerpoint you are being engaging and dynamic. However, when your slides are full of text and nothing else, you are bound to bore and overwhelm people.
I think that making an effective powerpoint presentation is an art. A skill that is developed as you develop more and more presentations in your given field. An effective powerpoint presentation for engineering looks much different than the presentation in the field of education. Although both have common elements, the audience is vastly different.
I like the “assertion-evidence model” because at lease to me, it is new and innovative. It appears as if it makes students focus on the material and pay greater attention to the speaker rather than just getting the important or key information from a bulleted powerpoint presentation.
-Lisceth
There are some great thoughts here! I like the “assertion-evidence” model as a way to create more effective PowerPoints in certain contexts. I think the “Before and After” section is particularly revealing. However, I still struggle very much with use of these materials in the classroom.
Like Alan, I wonder about the limitations of PowerPoint and similar presentation software as teaching tools–and I’m coming from the context of writing and literature courses. The now-famous “Death by Powerpoint” presentation/article makes some key suggestions about how to make presentations more effective. One of the key ideas I take away from it is that slides should emphasize just one key idea. But this model really does seem to be created for business contexts and to convey information to create an impact. It seems to me that this software might work best to introduce either small amounts of information or broad, key ideas. In many classes, we’re doing more than just meting out information. How might we adapt it to allow students the opportunity test out and/or wrestle with concepts? How do we fight against the type of near-automatic passivity that comes over us when we find ourselves in a darkened room looking at a bright, shiny screen?
Personally, when I have attempted to create these types of presentations, I have found that the biggest barrier is TIME. It takes me a great deal of time to prepare a PowerPoint presentation that is more than just bullet points. I have attempted to use them to model certain skills and vocabulary for literary analysis, for example. And when I use them in class, I struggle with engaging students actively in the information. When I’m pressed for time, I tend to abandon PowerPoint presentations in favor of student activities. I’d love to have a broader discussion about the contexts and situations in which PowerPoint is useful
Sometimes I find it effective to even leave off the text (in this model the assertion) completely and just have a picture and/or graph. I often struggle with students just wanting to write down what is on the slide, and not listen or engage to what I say. When I teach human development/psychology courses I will often simply show a results graph or table (and nothing else) on a slide. Without bullet-point information to write down, students are encouraged to think about the results/study and in the context of the information I present orally.
I think the most powerful use of powerpoint provides visual ‘eye candy’ whilst providing a basis for revision materials. Most commonly, I’ve seen this achieved with slides following the design principles outlined here along with a companion handout with blanks to fill in. Of course there’s always the temptation to add more text, but the art of a good powerpoint presentation is to convey the information with as little text as possible. I do wonder how easy this is to achieve in certain disciplines (such as English literature), where there is a focus on the text used. Perhaps this is an example where there are better alternatives than the rush to embrace slideshows.
Personally, I feel that for my discipline (biology) an important part of teaching is to link what is being taught with real world examples. In a lecture theatre setting PowerPoint really helps in this. For example, when demonstrating the different cell types in a leaf, a photograph of a leaf cross section is easier to connect with and remember than a chalkboard-drawn cartoon. Nevertheless, there are instances where a picture can’t cover the point that is trying to be made e.g. in the case of equations etc. In this case I feel that some of the downfalls of the “data dumping” problem can be ameliorated by only revealing one portion of the slide at a time. That is, if bullet points are necessary, only reveal the first point while you talk about it, then add the second, and so on, therefore hopefully keeping the attention more focussed.
In the past I have favored the more minimal approach with only a few kew points of text per slide. This is from personal experience where if there is a large amount of text on a slide, I end up focussing on reading that while losing track of what the speaker is saying and often getting ahead of the point that he or she is making in the process. Recently however I was talking with someone who brought up the point that people whose first language is not English often prefer more text on the screen as it helps with their overall comprehension of what is being discussed.
Wow, this is eye opening. I really like the concept of the “assertion-evidence structure” method, and it seems to have some proven success for student learning. It is especially applicable to my field, the biological sciences, where examples are easily shown through static images: graphs to visualize trends, photographs (of organismal anatomy or landscape features, for example), and figures of multi-step processes (like the Krebs cycle). I wonder, though, if there are other disciplines where this would be tough to implement. Perhaps, if you can use video or even music/sounds as evidence for your assertion, it would be more applicable to a variety of fields. It would certainly add another dimension to the classroom and re-engage students who have…mentally… drifted…off…