PowerPoint Visuals in the Humanities

In recent years, PowerPoint presentations have become the medium of choice for high school and college educators. Research on images in these presentations has determined that relevant diagrams and graphics improve learning in science and engineering fields; however, there has been little research on images in the humanities, where diagrams are less common. This study first surveyed college students to determine which images are considered informative and which are considered decorative. Using these results, I presented a new group of participants with humanities content accompanied by different image types. Participants then took a quiz on the content. Quiz results seem to indicate that the images deemed “informative” and text-only slides aided retention the most. A surprising finding was how often SmartArt and images accidentally contradicted the slide’s main ideas and hurt retention. This finding could help educators and presenters avoid using contradictory or backfiring visuals. This report concludes with a recommendation for a usability test that presenters can use to assess the efficacy of their slide visuals. Introduction With the multitude of professors and student presenters using PowerPoint slides, combined visual and verbal learning has never been as common in academia as it is currently. These presentations are used across a wide variety of disciplines, from engineering to art history. Slides from these presentations can also be screen captured along with voice narration to create educational videos. Due to its growing use, PowerPoint slide design has been a popular subject of research in both pedagogy and cognitive science. Despite its prevalence, most PowerPoint presentations are ineffective and often criticized. Alley et al. note several illustrative headlines in their article about slide design: “PowerPoint is Evil” (Wired), and “Is PowerPoint the Devil” (The Chicago Tribune), for instance (“Common Use of PowerPoint” 331). Default settings in PowerPoint itself cause many users to crowd slides with text and use ineffective phrase headings (Alley et al, “Common Use of PowerPoint” 334). The common use of long bulleted lists not only increases the audience’s cognitive load, but also fails to show any logical relationships between