PowerPoint Tips Blog » research

Why do 60% of students find their lectures boring?

Ellen — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:34:47 +0000

I just found a great article by Sandi Mann in The Guardian, called, “Why do 60% of students find their lectures boring? (Dr. Sandi Mann is senior lecturer in occupational psychology at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK.) You can probably guess what’s coming.

“One of the main contributors to student boredom is the use of PowerPoint. PowerPoint slides are a powerful aid to today’s lecturer, who can use it to easily prepare dozens of slides to accompany a lecture. And that is the problem – lecturers tend to prepare too many slides, pack them with too much information, and whizz through them in a manner that obliges students to spend most of the session attempting to copy copious amounts of text from the screen, while bypassing active processing of the material.”

What a great follow-up to my webinar last week on “Presenting to Teach & Inform: PowerPoint for Education & Training!“

The research Sandi did (with co-researcher Andrew Robinson) showed that almost 60% of students say that at least half their lectures are boring, and about 30% say that they find most or all of their lectures boring!

What do students do when they’re bored?

Daydream – 75% of students

Doodle – 66%

Chat with friends (electronically, perhaps) – 50%

Send texts – 45%

Pass notes to friends (the non-electronic version of chatting) – 38%

Over a quarter of students leave the lecture at the mid-session break!

Perhaps the culture is different in the United States. It’s almost certainly different in India; in fact each region probably has its own statistics. But I think that the research applies generally to many places in the world. It’s pretty shocking. After all, education is supposed to be stimulating and enlightening!

How can we change this terrible situation? Do you have a suggestion for educating educators?

Ellen Finkelstein can train you or the presenters in your organization to create high-impact, engaging, professional presentations for training, sales, business, or education. For more information, please click here.

How to keep your audience’s attention

Ellen — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:30:46 +0000

Chris Atherton (and more about her here) has a great blog post on how to give a presentation that keeps your audience’s attention. It’s from the angle of student presentations (she’s a college lecturer), but the points apply to any presenter.

Dr. Atherton’s research

Dr. Atherton also did research comparing slides with significant bulleted text and those with little text. Students were tested on the material. In multiple-choice tests, there was no difference, but in short essay tests, students who saw what she calls “sparse slides” did twice as well.

You can see Dr. Atherton’s slides on slideshare, but they aren’t fully comprehensible without the presentation she gave on the subject.You can read a good write up in Olivia Mitchell’s blog.

What about business presentations?

Even for business presentations, you want your audience to understand and remember what you say! So, what do you do?

My Tell ‘n’ Show^SM method shows you how to create slides without bullets. Not only is it easy, your slides will look so much better. And you’ll gain more success meeting your goals, whatever they may be. For a free course, download my white paper, “From Death by PowerPoint to Life by PowerPoint with the Tell ‘n’ Show^SM method.”

You can do it! Banish bullet points forever!

Do the research!

Ellen — Thu, 10 Jul 2003 04:42:34 +0000

When preparing for a presentation, you often need to research facts and figures, as well as find quotes and opinions, before you draw your own conclusions (or to back up your own opinions).

It’s important to get the facts right. A friend recently told me about an experience he had giving a lecture. He mentioned a “fact” about some scientific research but during the Q&A period, a member of the audience challenged him on it. He wasn’t sure, which made him lose the authority he’d worked so hard to develop with the audience. When he looked it up later, he discovered that what he’d said wasn’t accurate. He’s determined not to have that happen again!

How do you research a topic? Where do you go? Of course, it depends on your topic, but the principle is the same: look for non-partisan, original sources of the highest caliber.

Look for academic sources

In the field of multimedia, for example, I look for academic sources. There’s a fair amount of research that’s been done in the field. In business, you can also look for academic research on marketing, human resources, productivity, and more.

Academic sources have a number of advantages:

They’re generally non-partisan; researchers are not supposed to advocate a point of view
They are respected
Published research is a primary resource; you’re getting the information first-hand
You can cite the exact source, page number and so on– that looks impressive!

Sometimes you can correspond with the authors of published research. Their e-mail addresses are often available on the Web site of their university and they may even welcome inquiries.

Find writers who do their research

You might not have the time or resources (such as subscriptions to the journals) to do all of your own research. In this case, you may want to rely on articles that others have written. If you do so, you need to carefully judge the credentials of the author and the thoroughness of the research.

Look for articles that include references, indicating that the author did the research you don’t have the time to do. Also, when you do a search on the Internet, go to Web sites that have reputable names.

For example, Adobe’s Web site has an article, “The value of multimedia in learning,” written by Patti Shank, Ph.D. I encourage you to read this article to see what makes a reputable source. Even if you don’t read the entire article, scroll down to read the References section at the end.

When you include certain words in a Google search, such as research, Google displays a section on scholarly articles.

google search

Google has special search engines for scholarly articles and university sites. The university site search engine is for searching within the site of a specific university; you need to specify the university first.

Keep track of your sources

Write down and keep your sources, making them as complete as if you were creating a bibliography. This means you should include the the following:

author
the name of book or article
the date published
the journal or publisher
the place published (if a book)
the issue number (if a journal)
the page number
the URL, if any

Here’s an example of a full reference for a journal article:

Kafai, Y., C. Ching, and S. Marshall (1997). Children as designers of educational multimedia software. Computers Education, 29, (2/3), 117-126.

You don’t need to include the reference on your slides or in your verbal presentation. You need to keep it for back up in case your sources are challenged. However, you can, and should, certainly give attribution for what you say. Give credit where credit is due. So, you could say, for example,

“Mao Neo and Ken T. K. Neo, faculty at Multimedia University in Malaysia, say that multimedia is ‘the combination of various digital media types, such as text, images, sound, and video, into an integrated multisensory interactive application or presentation to convey a message or information to an audience.’ ” (This sentence is from the above-referenced article.)

Try to use recent references if possible, as they’ll be more pertinent and authoritative. Old research is often superseded by newer research.

Verify your sources

If a claim seems doubtful, try to find corroboration. Recently, I got a flyer in the mail from Prevention Magazine, which gets a certain level of trust from me. One part said,

“If you’d love to drop 10 to 20 pounds of fat faster than you ever believed possible, you must learn about Mother Nature’s greatest weight-reduction nutrient.

“It’s called chromium… For MDs helping their patients win the battle of the bulge, this all-natural, perfectly safe nutrient may be the greatest weight-reducer ever discovered…

“In one study at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, researchers found that women taking the right eweight-loss dosage and the right type of chromium saw a remarkable transofmation in their bodies. …they were 100% more successful in turning flab into lean, svelte body lines”

Sounds good, right? Sounds respectable and they quote some research. A search on chromium weight loss turned up “Chromium Picolinate and Weight Loss” from Vanderbilt University’s Web site. This article reviews the research done on chromium and weight loss, and finds that in study after study, it isn’t effective! A long list of references follows the article.

I’ve lost my trust in Prevention Magazine!

If you see a claim that you want to use, try to find it verify it from the original source. You may have heard the claim that 30 million PowerPoint presentations are given every day. Here’s a great article, “Dr Livingston I presume?” by Robert Befus, from the Visual Being blog, trying to track down the source of that statement.

Guess what? The author couldn’t find the source!

Microsoft said it came from Presentations Magazine
Presentations Magazine said it came from Geetesh Bajaj, owner of Indezine, com.
Geetesh said it came from an article by Ian Parker, “ABSOLUTE POWERPOINT: Can a software package edit our thoughts?“
In the article, Ian Parker attributes the statement to Microsoft.

Back where we started from!

Citing opinions

Opinions are different. Anyone has the right to an opinion, but whose opinion do you trust? Whose opinion do you want to put out there as authoritative? Therefore, look for the most well-known and respected sources for opinions.

Of course, you’re entitled to your own opinions. And in fact, a presentation is stronger when you have a point of view and have drawn a conclusion from your research. But make clear that the opinion is yours. Don’t pass it off as absolute fact. If you can cite respected third-party opinions, and bring the audience through your facts, data, and logic, you’ll be able to bring them around to agree with your opinion. That will be an impressive success!