Ashley Gumbrell is a lecturer at St Mary’s University, Twickenham and Course Lead for the MSc Performance Football Coaching. Ashley has 20 years experience as a coach educator, mentor and teacher across numerous settings in the football industry.
The context
Think back to the last presentation you watched or gave. Did the presenter just read off their slides or present screenfuls of bullet points? Were you still furiously making notes when the presenter skipped to the next slide? Did you put together a great presentation only to watch it fall flat with your audience? Presentations can inadvertently overload an audience, creating disengagement and lowering the likelihood of learning. Cognitive load theory (Sweller, 2016; Lovell, 2020) suggests possible causes for this overload and ways to help teachers and presenters avoid it. This blog will suggest a few techniques to help increase the impact of your next lesson or lecture.
The problem
Cognitive architecture (see Lovell, 2020, for a comprehensive overview) determines how our mind processes information through structures such as the working memory. Cognitive load describes the volume of information we can process, but the limits of our working memory mean that we cannot hold lots of information at once (Kirschner, 2019). Teachers and presenters should therefore seek to deliver content in a manner which reduces the cognitive load for the audience, whilst maximising potential learning and retention of information.
I believe presentations can overload for two reasons. The first is that the content is pitched too high (when listening to content you don’t understand, your attention wanes eventually). The second, and most common, reason is that there is unhelpful or distracting content (fancy clipart, a presenter reading from a slide, large amounts of text on screen).
Good practice
Having watched hundreds of presentations and poured over much research, I have created five principles that I have found can have a positive impact on the effectiveness of presentations.
A note of caution. These principles are not there to compete with other instructional methods and whilst in many institutions we have come to rely on PowerPoint, your ‘pedagogical toolkit’ of techniques should be used in conjunction with these principles to support understanding. Your presentation slides will not, on their own, be the solution.
- Know your audience – You must know their wants and needs. A presentation for an interview may require less content and more context. On the other hand, students in a lecture will expect to be taught content which requires a blend of teaching techniques (not just a great slide deck) that allows them to understand content on many levels.
- Declutter – You can pack a lot into a single slide if you try (please don’t!). Images, logos, slide numbers, bullet points and text that compete for space are detrimental to engagement. If it does not aid learning or support your message, then do not include it on the slide.
- One message – It’s a frequently held belief that there is a magic number of slides for a presentation to be successful, but this does not have to be the case if each slide holds just one key message. Have as many as you need to get across your messages. Reynolds (2021) refers to slides full of content as ‘sliduments’ (slides that are like documents). If you need to provide notes, create handouts to support your audience.
- No sentences – Our brains can sometimes struggle to process written information on a slide at the same time as being asked to listen and/or review an image (see Caviglioli’s ‘Dual Coding for Teachers’, 2019).
- Effective imagery – Images can be very powerful, even when used alone as a prompt for your discussion. But images can also be distracting (clipart or memes). If you are using images make them meaningful and impactful, whilst being mindful of cultural references or interpretations of images used.
Consider yourself to be at a ‘presentation crossroads’. You can either follow the path already travelled or you can reflect on how effectively your content is presented which may lead to a change in the direction towards an even more exciting destination.
- Caviglioli, O. (2019) Dual Coding for Teachers. Woodbridge: John Catt Educational Ltd.
- Reynolds, G. (2021) Presentation Zen Tips.
- Kirschner, P. (2019) ‘Dual coding’, in O. Caviglioli (ed.) Dual Coding With Teachers. Woodbridge: John Catt Educational pp. 20-21.
- Lovell, O. (2020) Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory in action. Woodbridge: John Catt Educational Ltd.
- Sweller, J. (2016) ‘Working Memory, Long-term Memory, and Instructional Design’, Journal of applied research in memory and cognition, 5(4), pp. 360–367.