![]() ![]() For this reason, slides should not have color schemes with red on green or blue on yellow. Presenters should be wary of the colors used for presenting text and graphs. Font choice may seem inconsequential, but can have a major impact on a presentation. Comic Sans was used in the presentation of the discovery, and received mockery in the press (e.g., Urquhart, 2011). Even an announcement as monumental as the discovery of the Higgs Boson can be marred by a bad font. A poorly chosen font can negatively impact the perception of the material, and the perception of the presenter themselves (Oppenheimer and Frank, 2008). Other researchers have found a similar impact with difficult-to-read fonts (e.g., Schwarz, 2004 Rhodes and Castel, 2008 Sanchez and Jaeger, 2014). The researchers found that students who read the instructions in a difficult-to-read font were less willing to make the exercise a part of their daily routine, and perceived the exercise as requiring more time to complete than those students who read the same instructions in a clear font. For example, Song and Schwarz ( 2008) presented students with instructions for an exercise routine that was printed in either an easy-to-read font, or one that was difficult to read. From these resources, and the literature on design, educational and cognitive psychology, we can find some basic points that should be considered when using PowerPoint for lectures.īeyond aesthetics, font choice has an impact on how students process information. Books such as Presentation Zen (Reynolds, 2012), Slide:ology (Duarte, 2008), and Presentation Secrets (Kapterev, 2011) focus on design, and provide a different way of approaching PowerPoint. The images on the templates are tired, as templates with images that look the best tend to be the ones that are used the most.Ĭreating a well-designed PowerPoint presentation is not intuitive (Kosslyn et al., 2012), so where should an instructor look for guidance? Fortunately, there are many excellent resources. Whenever possible, we recommend avoiding the use of templates that are included with PowerPoint. For the most part, this has been shown to be an ineffective means to convey information (Garner and Alley, 2011). Upon opening PowerPoint, users are presented with standard templates with space to add a title at the top of the slide, and a block of text to add bullet points. The software itself does not provide any assistance. Excluding basic slides provided by publishing companies, instructors are given little guidance on what a PowerPoint presentation should look like. Needless to say, students were not impressed.įor the most part, graduate school does not train instructors how to properly use presentation software. To make matters worse, the instructor had the slide heavily animated-bullet points flew in, swirled around, and even made sound. The slide uses a template that makes the text difficult to read, there are several lengthy bullets, and the photos are too small. For example, Figure Figure1A 1A contains a slide that was prepared for a lecture in an introductory psychology course. Our slides used standard, boring templates were text heavy, and included grainy gif images-embarrassingly, some of which were even animated. The authors of this paper became interested in improving their PowerPoint slides after observing several presentations that badly misused PowerPoint, and realizing that they made many of the same mistakes. ![]() Strong PowerPoint presentations enhance student engagement and help students retain information (e.g., Susskind, 2005), while weak PowerPoint slides can lead to distraction, boredom, and impeded learning (Savoy et al., 2009). Academics typically only endure weak PowerPoint presentations at conferences, while university students may be exposed to them several times a day for an entire semester. Often to blame is the use and abuse of PowerPoint 1 (e.g., Tufte, 2003 Bumiller, 2010). There is nothing more frustrating than sitting through a presentation bombarded by slide after slide of small text, difficult to read graphs, irrelevant clip art images, and poorly designed templates. ![]()
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