Effects of PowerPoint Presentations on Students’ Learning

Project Report By:
Dinesh Kumar Veloo
K Parvathy
Sourav Dhal

Table of Contents
Acknowledgement ……………………………………………………………………………….…. 2
Executive Summary ………………………………………………………………………………… 3
Purpose and Scope ………………………………………………………………………...………... 4
Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………. 5
Literature Review …………………………………………………………………………..……….. 6
Methodology ………………………………………………………………………………………... 7
Data Analysis & Findings …………………………………………………………………………… 8
Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………....…….……. 9
Recommendations/s (if any) …………………………………………………….............………… 10
Limitations …………………………………………………………………………........………… 11
Appendix ……………………………………………………………………………….…..……… 12
References …………………………………………………………………...……………..……… 16

Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Dr. Deepa Sethi, Assistant Professor for providing us with the opportunity to work on this project. Her support and guidance at every stage was highly instrumental in our progress.
We would also like to thank Ms.Shindya, Teaching Assistant for scheduling meetings with Prof. Deepa
The resources available from our library were extremely useful for our literature study.
Most importantly, we thank the students for their time and co-operation in filling our survey

Executive Summary
The effectiveness of PowerPoint as a teaching aid was observed since its introduction in 1997. In the initial years, the response from the students was highly positive. This could be acknowledged from the higher grades, increase in attendance and reduction in disruptive behaviour, when compared to other mediums like the blackboard and transparent overheads.
But, there was also a study which showed that the students’ performance depended on the difficulty of the lecture and not on the medium of teaching. Still, the positive attitude of students towards PowerPoint remained.
With time, students seem to be losing interest in PowerPoint, which is evident from the increase in inappropriate behaviour and expression of their boredom. Also, some students are undermining the importance of attending classes if the PowerPoint are made available on the Web.
A survey was conducted among students to gauge the current effectiveness of PowerPoint as a teaching aid. PowerPoint as a teaching aid still continues to be preferred by student community; however there is also a growing enthusiasm for other alternate innovative teaching methodologies.

Purpose and Scope
The purpose of this research is to gauge the effectiveness of the PowerPoint presentations on students’ learning, as perceived by them. The sample students were asked to assess the PowerPoint presentations generally used in a classroom setup based on different parameters. It’s a common feeling among students and faculty members that PowerPoint is a very effective tool. The exercise will establish its effectiveness in a concretized manner. It is expected that the findings from the research will give a clearer picture regarding the scope to switch from PowerPoint to other pedagogical tools. Hopefully, the prevalent concept of mandatory class attendance in most of our schools can also be deliberated upon based on the responses of students.

Introduction
In recent years with the advancement of technology and extensive use of the same across varied fields, the uses of PowerPoint (a form of multimedia) presentations has sizeably increased globally. At any point, PowerPoint can be found on 250 million computers worldwide. According to Microsoft, 219 million PowerPoint presentations take place every day: 1.25 million every hour [1]. Since its introduction in 1997 PowerPoint has become indispensable to instruction at most institutions, especially at B-schools and in the corporate world. Most of the universities, colleges and increasing number of schools have already switched to this pedagogical approach from traditional lecture delivery methods. Both faculty and scholars think that these modes of tutoring augment the learning process. Although students feel that PowerPoint is a good medium to structure the content, it has several shortcomings; it tends to oversimplify data and overlooks vital details. The undeviating nature of PowerPoint slides makes the presenter to cut short a complex subject to a set of bullet items which are too weak to back up a decision. Empirical substantiation backing these perceptions is inconsistent, however. A great deal of research work has been done regarding PPT’s effectiveness, although it is largely anecdotal and editorial in nature [2]. One crucial area not focussed much in the past studies is the magnitude to which students perceive PowerPoint as an effective way communication in a given academic setup. In this empirical study, we have tried to gauge broadly the effect of PowerPoint presentations on students’ learning. The data collection technique employed was floating an online questionnaire of 10 relevant questions (mostly objective types) outfitting our primary objective.

Literature Review
Many research works in the past have tried to assess the effectiveness of PowerPoint presentations as a teaching medium. A common outcome of these studies indicates that students by large have a positive attitude towards computer mediated presentations including PowerPoint slides. However, their impact on learning and retention is uncertain [3]. There is no concrete evidence that PowerPoint presentations improve short term or long term memory [4]. Soon after the introduction of PowerPoint in 1997, Harknett and Cobane (1997) provide a descriptive, account of the efficacy of PowerPoint in lecturing. Eighty percent of the students surveyed by the authors felt that PowerPoint lectures benefited their learning. Some felt that the visual emphasis in PowerPoint helped them recall the lecture material at the time of examination. However, apart from the students' positive attitude towards this method of lecturing, no other significant benefits of PowerPoint were disclosed. The authors suggest that PowerPoint slides are easy to update and that they can provide excellent opportunity for creating electronic hand-outs. These hand-outs can be linked to World Wide Web (WWW) pages from where the students can download them, print them, or revisit them if they need to. However, the findings emerging from this study cannot be generalised because it is unclear how many students were surveyed and how many lectures were presented with PowerPoint.
Evans (1998) did a study on a class of 161 students, wherein he concluded that the performance of students taught via PowerPoint was significantly better than students who were taught via traditional techniques. He also made an interesting observation that the students’ attendance was better in the former case and frequency of disruptive behaviour i.e. hostile attitudes, inappropriate remarks and overt expression of boredom was much lesser. Similarly, Bartsch and Cobern (2003) compared the effectiveness of overheads, basic PPT (text only), and expanded PPT (with graphics and sounds); they found that students significantly scored better at the end of the semester in the basic PPT condition on content recall.
However, some studies give us contradictory results, e.g. Daniels (1999) reported no significant differences in students’ cognitive performance when PowerPoint was used. In Amare’s study (2006) of undergraduate students in a technical writing course, performance scores were actually higher in the traditional lecture format than in PPT-enhanced lectures. Thus, findings about the effect of PPT on academic performance are somewhat mixed.

In the year 2000, in a study by Szabo and Hastings revealed that the lecture difficulty and not the method of lecturing, contributed to the grade differences on mock tests. It is suggested that the efficacy of PowerPoint lecturing may be case specific rather than universal. Over 65% of the students felt that the method is motivating them to come to the lectures. These affirmations support the findings of Evans (1998) that PowerPoint lectures help in increasing attendance rate at lectures. Contrary to this, an interesting outcome from the study by Frey and Birnbaum (2002) in a Russian fairy tale course indicated that 19% of students felt that use of PowerPoint led to an increase in inappropriate student behaviours; specifically, 15% of respondents claimed they were less likely to attend the class when notes were posted on the Web.

And in the James et al. (2006) investigation, students did not believe that posting notes on the Web affected their motivation to attend class. Again, there are conflicting results, suggesting that other variables might be at play, meriting exploration

Methodology
In this research, an empirical approach of floating an online questionnaire has been taken up for measuring students’ perceptions about the effectiveness of the PowerPoint as a teaching tool. The research predominantly includes students from the postgraduate program of IIMK. Student views of the helpfulness of PowerPoint compared to traditional teaching methods were assessed. A total of 10 questions with respect to the presentation of class material, student understanding of course material, and classroom interactions were administered to student samples. Questions floated were mostly objective type with minimal requirement of writing any text inputs from the user side to facilitate easy and quick response. Questions were broadly based on how students perceive the effectiveness of the PowerPoint presentations, relevance of the slides to the course content, impact of graphical representation, infographics and further expectations.

Data Analysis & Findings
Sample Space: A total of 116 volunteers filled the survey form.
Findings:
Majority of faculty members are using PowerPoint as a teaching aid. PowerPoint is regarded as an effective tool by 57.9% of the surveyed students. 31.58% of the students find it somewhat effective.
50% of the students feel that 10-20 slides are ideal for a presentation in a 1 hour session. However there are 31.58% of students who find 20-30 slides acceptable, this could be attributed to the varied styles of presentation & amount of content per slide.
85.98% of the students have indicated their strong preference for usage of info-graphics (such as graphs, charts, tables, pictures etc.) in presentations compared to purely text based presentations.
53.16% of the students have indicated their preference for attending classes compared to mere learning from PowerPoint slides provided by faculty by avoiding classes. However 36.94% of students are indecisive about attending class without using slides or vice-versa.
88.5% of students have expressed great enthusiasm for pedagogy complemented by teaching aids other than PowerPoint slides.

Conclusion
PowerPoint as a teaching aid still continues to be preferred by student community; however there is also a growing enthusiasm for other alternate innovative teaching methodologies.

The high-tech developments over the last decade or so undoubtedly have a noteworthy impact on the education area as well as other areas. In line with this, tutoring methodologies have undergone subsequent changes. Students are influenced by the sessions facilitated via PowerPoint presentations. On the other hand, they give some advantages to lecturer as saving or updating the lecture materials. At the same time teaching with PowerPoint presentations enforce the learning effectiveness by stimulating student’s imagery systems. There are a lot of studies in the literature concerning effectiveness of PowerPoint presentations and relating to various disciplines and using various methodologies. These studies have indicated very different results. When the results of this study was evaluated, a significant impact could not been found concerning the effect of the student’s preferences for PowerPoint presentations in accounting lesson on final examination scores. However various relations were examined by developing the model used in the study and when the preferences for PowerPoint presentations analyzed with the studying environment, the results have indicated that this relation has an increasing effect on the final examination scores. In other words, positive preferences of students who access to slides and have enough studying environment effect the final examination score positively. Used properly, PowerPoint can enhance a presentation without being reductive

Recommendations/s (if any)

Faculty should avoid overuse of PowerPoint as a teaching aid.
The PowerPoint should be crisp & should contain a good mix of text, info-graphics & audio-visual content wherever possible. Pedagogical aids such as Case studies, movie screenings, live projects, simulation games (wherever applicable), role plays etc. can be adopted as there is great enthusiasm among student community for such methodologies.

Limitations
As with all empirical studies, there are some inherent unavoidable limitations to this research as well. It has been assumed that all responses are genuine. Some incomplete response sheets would be another limitation. A major constraint would be the limited sample size of students whose response was collected, analyzed and interpreted. The reason for this can be attributed to the fact that the method of sampling was only through online floating of questionnaire on social media sites predominantly aimed at students of IIMK. Another limitation in the scope of the research could also be the inability to quantitatively assess the effect of PowerPoint presentations on students’ performance through a field experiment. Had this been carried out, it could have possibly given a better insight to the whole research. The inability on the researchers’ part is mainly because of the time constraint.

Appendix

1. Rate the effectiveness of using PowerPoint as a teaching aid on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being the lowest and 5 the highest)

2. How many course facilitators frequently use PowerPoint Slides?

3. Maximum number of slides in a session you are comfortable with

4. PowerPoint are being extensively used for some courses even when they could be avoided

5. The importance of pictorial/graphical representation of data rather than simple text format

6. How relevant are the contents of PowerPoint with the course textbook theory/explanations

7. How effective is the inclusion of info graphics in the PowerPoint slides

8. The importance of attending classes if you have access to all courses PowerPoint slides

9. During sessions, is the content of the PowerPoint simply reiterated from the slides rather than being used as a support medium

10. Are there any courses that are currently being taught through PowerPoint slides but would be more effective through other pedagogical techniques?

References