PowerPoint
Are PowerPoint presentations effective?
Clark (2008) shows that lecturing with PowerPoint presentations is more effective than lecturing without since they create a more stimulating and accessible learning environment for students.
What about student performance?
Most in the literature find no significant effect of slide availability on student performance (Garrett, 2015). However, some studies conclude otherwise:
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Positive effects on students’ performance that have less than a perfect attendance (Harmon et al. 2015).
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Negative effects on student performance (Worthington & Levasseur, 2015 and León & García-Martínez, 2021)
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Positive for students high on self-efficacy and males, and negative for students low on self-efficacy and female (Zdaniuk et al., 2019).
When to provide students with PowerPoint presentations?
Grabe (2005), Grabe et al. (2005), and Chen and Lin (2008) demonstrate that PowerPoint presentations are most effective when students can download them before the lecture. But, Weatherly et al. (2003), Debevec et al. (2006), Frank et al. (2009), and León & García-Martínez (2021) express doubts as providing PowerPoint presentations may have negative impacts on class attendance.
How to design PowerPoint presentations?
Vazquez and Chiang (2014) show that PowerPoint presentations should be designed carefully to be effective teaching and learning tools. They show how the visual appearance of slides is important to properly convey a message to students and provide necessary recommendations, based on findings from cognitive and brain science, to design effective slides. Garrett (2015) shows that students prefer downloading slides with "a large number of concise bullet points."
