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Avoiding PowerPoint Overload

Research-Based Principles to Avoid PowerPoint Overload

Our understanding of how the brain processes and stores information has three implications for how you design PowerPoint slides to promote students’ attention and retention of materials. These include:

  1. Filling slides with information overloads students’ cognitive systems.
  2. Instructors should use both words and pictures in their PowerPoint slides.
  3. PowerPoint slides should help learners select, organize, and integrate the information that’s been presented to them.

Expandable List

In this section you will learn how you can apply research-based design principles by making use of common PowerPoint features to reduce your students’ cognitive load. These techniques are grounded in recommendations made by Cliff Atkinson and Richard Mayer (2004) based on Mayer’s 12 principles of multimedia learning (Mayer, 2005).

Reference List

  • Bartsch, R. A., & Cobern, K. M. (2003). Effectiveness of PowerPoint presentations in lectures. Computers & education, 41(1), 77-86.
  • Fenesi, B., Kramer, E., & Kim, J. A. (2016). Split‐Attention and Coherence Principles in Multimedia Instruction Can Rescue Performance for Learners with Lower Working Memory Capacity. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 30(5), 691-699.
  • Mayer, R. E. (2005). Principles for reducing extraneous processing in multimedia learning: Coherence, signalling, redundancy, spatial contiguity, and temporal contiguity principles. In R. E. Mayer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (pp. 183–200). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
  • Nelson, D. L. (1979). Remembering pictures and words: Appearance, significance and name. Information Processing Research in Advertising, 45-76.
  • Paivio, A. (1969). Mental imagery in associative learning and memory. Psychological review, 76(3), 241-263.
  • Weldon, M. S., & Roediger, H. L. (1987). Altering retrieval demands reverses the picture superiority effect. Memory & Cognition, 15(4), 269-280.