Designing Better Slides

Jennifer is getting ready for a presentation on a new surgical technique. She's going to be talking to fellow physicians and she wants them to understand the significant advantages of the new technique. She wants her slides to be effective; she's been to too many presentations where speakers sped through one page of bullet points after another.

What can she do to make her presentation more effective?

A recent study published in Medical Education can help her design her slides in ways that will help people better understand and remember her presentation.

The Study

The researchers compared the effectiveness of traditional bullet point slides to slides develop using principles of multimedia (Mayer, RE. ,2001, Multimedia Learning. Cambridge University Press).

Multimedia in this study means presenting information in different channels (visual and verbal), so instead of simply using text, the multimedia slides also used diagrams and pictures to help the audience understand the concepts. The pictures weren't just decorations, they were intended to help the learners from mental models of the information.

Medical students got either a lecture with the multimedia slides or a lecture with the traditional bullet point slides. Retention and transfer were measured immediately after the lecture, 1 week later, and 4 weeks later.

The slides designed using principles of multimedia resulted in significantly better retention and transfer at all time points.

Issa, N, Mayer, RE, Schuller, M, Wang, E, Shapiro, MB, and DA DaRosa, (2013) Teaching for understanding inmedical classrooms using multimedia design principles. Medical Education, 47:388-94.

What it means

We can use what we know about designing multimedia learning modules to make slide presentations more effective too. Lectures and slides are widely used for teaching in medical school and continuing medical education, increasing their effectiveness could have a big impact.

This study is particularly interesting because it looked at two different kinds of learning – retention and transfer – and measured that learning after a significant amount of time had passed. This gives us a lot more confidence about the effects of these changes than simply looking at retention immediately after the lecture.

How can you use this information?

You can revise your own slides in the same way the researchers did. They first looked at each slide to determine the key point, or message. Then, they used multimedia design principles to help each slide present information more effectively.

For instance, slides that used bulleted text were replaced by slides with diagrams or pictures. Important principles were highlighted with color and larger fonts. Graphs had explanatory text moved as close to them as possible so that people didn't have to spit their attention between a graph and a caption.