Students who can self-pace the beginning of an explanatory presentation learn more than when a computer takes the reigns

Source: Burlington Free Press

It's a familiar feeling for most college students. The professor pulls up their PowerPoint, the lights go down and the note-taking race begins.
Learning in a college classroom can feel like speeding down a winding road with no clear destination.

But there's still hope for the humble PowerPoint.  Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara tested several ways to present multimedia explanations, the academic term for a presentation about how or why something works, to shift the conversation on multimedia learning, and hopefully how teachers everywhere use digital tools to foster understanding.

During freshman year, large class sizes and and high instructor to student ratios often mean that the student experience become less interactive as the complexity of the material presented increases.

Rather than delving deeply into new concepts, class often consists of copying slides as quickly as pens and laptops will allow. This blog post by a former professor explains her problems with the modern lecture hall and includes a discussion with other educators at the bottom.

The California team sought to challenge this traditional learning model with their study on how students best understand presentations - by looking at them on their own at their own pace, or when watching at a computer or instructor set clip.

Researchers differentiated between only two types of presentations - self-paced presentations during which the student can view a screen or animation for as long as they want before continuing, or a computer-paced presentation where the student sees all of the information at once with no breaks.

The traditional college lecture is most similar to the computer-paced model.  Although most professors don't use animated narrations similar to those in the study, a lecturing professor controls the pace of the presentation, including how quickly they change text or video slides.

Before this study, most research suggested that this whole presentation model was most effective for learning because it gave students all of the context on a new topic at once.  However, researches for this study hypothesized that so much new information at once would lead to mental overload, a idea related to cognitive load theory.

Researchers split 60 college students from California into four groups and each group viewed the same presentation about how lightening forms two times.  One group watched the first time at their own pace and the second time all at once.  The second group watched the first time all at once and the second time at their own pace.  The third group watched both times at their own pace, and the fourth group watched the whole presentation at once for both rounds. Click here to read the full study with a more detailed description.

After viewing the presentations, all of the students took a test that required them to use what they learned to answer different questions about weather systems and lightening, as well as a quick survey about how easy the material was for them to learn.

The results may have surprised researchers, but mirror what many students have felt for year.  Trying
to process an entire presentation at once is not the best way to learn.

Students who were able to view the presentation at their own pace before watching the entire thing scored the highest on the test out of the four groups.  Students who self-paced both presentations also scored higher than students who watched the entire presentation at once two times in a row.

Taken into the classroom, these principles of cognitive processing, or the study of how students learn, suggest key changes for the traditional college professor.

Following these guidelines, professors would be wise to send out PowerPoint slides ahead of time to give students time to review the material at their own pace before coming to class.  In theory, this would increase participation and active listening during the lecture itself, but in practice professors would encounter many students who wouldn't show up once they had the lecture slides.

Instead, professors could give students in class access to the slides for the first 15 minutes of the class and use the presentation to the group as a starting point for questions on the material or deeper discussion.  Better yet, in smaller classes professors could gear their lectures toward more truly interactive learning models like small-group discussions, surveys or simulations.

Taken more broadly, other research on digital media in the classroom also shows that just because students have access to new ways to learn it doesn't mean an automatic increase in how well they understand the material.  Better test results happen when teachers combine multimedia presentation with what researchers already know about how the brain processes information and how that affects learning in the classroom.

Although this study came out a few years ago,  it only becomes more relevant as more of college learning, and even learning in middle and high school, moves online.  The shift toward technology in the classroom is likely permanent, and done correctly will lead to a new era of improved education for a larger variety of learners.

But for now it's time for professors to put down the clicker and back away slowly.  The data show that self-paced explanatory presentations are the way to go, and that the true meaning of information overload may be found in the traditional lecture hall instead of on the World Wide Web.