When’s the last time you attended a lecture and felt like nothing really stuck? On the flip side, how many times have you given a presentation and felt like your audience couldn’t grasp the ideas you were trying to convey? The central message of this module is that it matters a great deal how information is encountered the first time around. We’ll discuss several principles that will help you get the material to stick the first time you’re exposed to it, and just as important, ways to improve your own presentations so the material better sticks with your audience.
If you understand this module, you should be able to explain to a friend why:
1. Note-taking
Notes can easily be constructed to take advantage of retrieval practice
Short-hand notes are likely better for learning than verbatim notes
2. Multimedia principles
Too much text on a slide is a bad thing
There’s an optimal balance between visual and verbal information
Each chunk of visual information should appear in sequence rather than all at once
Presenters often overestimate the cognitive constraints of their audience
In this section we’ll briefly touch on some tips for note taking.
1 The Cornell method
Like we discussed in the previous module, retrieving information from memory seems to be a promising way to retain it in the long-term. And it turns out you can easily create your lecture or presentation notes to take advantage of retrieval practice when you go back to study them. It’s called the Cornell method.
This is all you have to do: Take out a lined piece of paper (or your preferred software) and draw a vertical line about 5 cm from the left side. During the lecture or presentation you write your notes just as you normally would on the right-hand side. Use concise sentences, lists, or diagrams as you see fit. Then, as soon as possible after the lecture or presentation, write questions on the left-hand side that stem from the notes you took, trying to hone in on the major concepts. Voila! Now when you study your notes, start by covering up the right-hand side and trying to recall answers to all the questions. You can then use the notes section to check your answers.
Avoid transcription (when possible)
It’s also important to consider that different types of note-taking will lead to remembering of different kinds of information. For example, with the popularity of laptops, many students feel compelled to write down every word uttered by the speaker—essentially transcribing the whole lecture or presentation. While this may be a suitable strategy if the notes are not available elsewhere, or if the upcoming test focuses on nitty gritty details, there is research to suggest that it impairs understanding.
Avoid transcription (when possible)
For example, in one study participants were asked to take notes on TED talks just as they normally would for a class, but with either a laptop or pen-and-paper. Their notes were then taken away from them. After a delay of approximately 30 minutes, participants then tried to answer conceptual questions about the video they watched (How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?”). The questions were scored by people who were not privy to the design of the experiment. Although the laptop-users wrote down significantly more words in their notes, the pen-and-paper-users were significantly better at answering conceptual questions.
Multimedia principles
This section will highlight the most common mistakes that presenters make with multimedia instruction—especially PowerPoint slides. These mistakes will be explained within a cognitive framework, which argues that the brain is limited in the amount of information it can process at any given time, and that information must be presented in a way that minimizes demands on the audience.
The most common mistake is one affectionately called “death by bullet-point”, and it’s basically just too much text on slides. It’s easy for the presenter to type up bullet points on each slide and feel confident they’re not missing any critical information. However, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the audience to simultaneously listen to the presenter while also making sense of the on-screen text. It becomes a juggling act. This relates closely to our discussion on multi-tasking in the previous module. A popular work-around from the audience is to actually ignore the presenter altogether and transcribe as much on-screen text as possible. Not only is this dry and unengaging, it is also very passive. As many students will attest, the presenter might as well give students their slides and save themselves the trouble of presenting.
Why are bullet points and simultaneous presenter speech so problematic? One popular account is known as “dual-coding theory”. The idea is that the human brain processes information through two different channels: a verbal channel and a visual channel. For example, when you’re listening to a presenter speak or read words on a slide, the information is travelling through the verbal channel, and when you decide to look at a diagram on the slide it is travelling through the visual channel.
By this view, the issue with death-by-bullet point is that the on-screen text and presenter’s speech compete for the verbal channel, which is limited in capacity—it can only process so much verbal information. It “jams up”, forcing the audience to switch between paying attention to the speaker and the text. This prevents them from drawing meaningful connections. Try this out: Next time you’re listening to a death by bullet-point presentation, pay close attention to what you’re doing; chances are you’ll notice yourself going back and forth between the text and the speaker, struggling to make sense of it all.
Visuals should be used strategically to avoid jams in the verbal channel. Think of it this way: A purely verbal description, whether narrated or printed in text, sometimes makes it harder to learn because you must devote your limited cognitive resources to visualizing the key processes before you can make sense of the verbal information. On the contrary, images showing key processes and concepts, like arterial blood flow, or empirical data in the form of a graph, help the audience integrate the verbal information with the visual information on the slide. Optimal learning is thought to take place when the right amount of information comes in through both the verbal and visual channels.
As a more concrete example, in one study learners watched a lecture presented in one of three presentation styles: one was a narrator’s speech with only audio, one had bullet points of text that were synchronize with the narrator’s speech, and one had images that complemented the narrator’s speech with minimal text.
They were later given a test on the material to see how much they understood. Many people intuitively believe the extra text should confer at least some advantage over the podcast because technically there is twice as much raw information presented. But this was clearly not the case; it failed to produce benefits relative to the audio only condition. Moreover, it led to worse performance relative to the complementary images condition with minimal text. This is presumably because in the complementary images condition the verbal information went through the verbal channel and the images went through the visual channel, leading to less “jamming” of the channels and better integration of the two types of information.
Script – Split Attention
But there’s more to the story than just putting any old images on your slide. Another important principle to keep in mind is that too much of either information—verbal or visual—can make it so that the audience does not know where to focus. People’s attention can easily be split if you’re talking about one aspect of the slide while the learner is trying to figure out where they should be looking.
Imagine you are a student in lecture and the professor puts up this complicated graph for just 30 seconds. The only reason for putting up the graph is to explain why there is one simple trend. In the professor’s head it’s obvious where the students should be looking. However, the audience doesn’t have the same knowledge, and so they may spend the full 30 seconds scanning the image trying to find out what the professor is referencing while hearing the verbal explanation, ultimately failing to understand the larger point being made.
Script – Signaling
The key to preventing split attention is to be extra careful with how much information you put on your slides, and to be extra conservative when estimating how much information the audience can keep in mind at any one time. It’s easier said than done when the material is more complex.
One effective but overlooked strategy is called “signaling”. In a nutshell, this means breaking up the different visual “bits” of information on the slide and having each bit appear in sequence, rather than putting all the visuals up at once and hoping that the audience can follow along. See if you can follow along with this hypothetical data set This makes the ideas more digestible because it prevents distraction from other visuals, encouraging consolidation of the information in an appropriate sequence.
Script – Be mindful of cognitive constraints
The take-away from this section is that we tend to assume our audience has a greater cognitive capacity than they actually do. You may know where the relevant information is on the slide while you’re speaking, but the audience doesn’t. This is why it’s critical to assume your audience has little or no background knowledge, and to keep reminding yourself to see each slide from the audience’s perspective. Avoid overwhelming your audience by doing things like keeping text to a minimum, using pictures that complement your narration, and signaling each bit of visual information as you go.
A useful tip is to practice presenting to people who have little or no expertise with your topic. Give them the presentation and ask them key questions to see how they respond, like: “What main ideas did you get from the presentation?”, or “What did you think were the key points?”. If you’re pleased with their responses and they match what you were intending to say, it’s probably a good presentation. But if they’re fumbling with their words and can’t articulate the main points, your presentation needs more work.
Take Home Messages
Note-taking
Notes can easily be constructed to take advantage of retrieval practice
Short-hand notes are likely better for learning than verbatim notes
Multimedia principles
Too much text on a slide is a bad thing
There’s an optimal balance between visual and verbal information
Each chunk of visual information should appear in sequence rather than all at once
Presenters often overestimate the cognitive constraints of their audience