Presentation Best Practices

Introduction

According to Dr. Richard Mayer’s research on multimedia learning, there are three main instructional goals or problems for presenters and media creators. They are:

  • Reducing extraneous processing – don’t make extra work for your learners by including unimportant text or graphics
  • Managing essential processing – avoid cognitive overload of the working memory
  • Fostering generative processing – aid your student’s sense-making and organization

These three goals are a foundation for the more detailed tips below. For more on teaching with multimedia, see our Principles for Teaching with Multimedia page.

This page will cover presentation best practices for UWSOM instructors:

*Items marked with an asterisk are suggestions from Foundations Phase medical students at UWSOM and were compiled by Michael Robinson (E-2017).

Powerpoint Template with Guidance

The following slides include guidance on how to teach using multimedia, presentation best practices, and directions on how to use a PowerPoint template.  These slides are also a template you can use to build your own presentation.

Download

Organizing Your Content

The first and most important step in a good presentation is to know your purpose and your audience and to tailor your presentation to them.

Outlining Your Presentation

  • Start your presentation with an overview of what will be covered and the expected learning outcomes for students – provide a road map for what you will be presenting. (fostering generative processing)
  • Whether you are starting from scratch or editing an existing presentation, create a hierarchical outline to define your teaching plan.
    • Start with the primary learning goals for your session (learning objectives), the reasons they’re important, and their connections to previous material. This will become your session introduction. (fostering generative processing)
    • Note your boundaries on each topic -what do you not need to teach about each one? See “Scope, Breadth, Depth, and Level” below. Ask your block director or colleagues if you’re not sure what the focus should be and what might be too much. (reducing extraneous processing)
    • Design your presentation to have logical sections that will take you several to fifteen minutes each. Look to do some sort of check for understanding at the end of each section. More on that in the “Presenting to Students” section below. (fostering generative processing)
    • Fill in the explanation you will use for each point and sub point and any important connecting details between them. This is the most critical point for being your own editor. It’s easy to go overboard here, so stick to your objectives. Your main goals here are to reduce extraneous processing and foster generative processing.
    • Estimate how much time each section will take. If it already looks like your cutting things close, you can edit, assign some of the material for out-of-class reading, or ask your director if it belongs elsewhere in the course. Remember to always allow time for questions and checks for understanding. (managing essential processing)
    • Summarize each section before moving to the next topic. Breaking each subject up in this way allows learners to follow you without being overwhelmed. (fostering generative processing)
  • If you are distributing a slide deck to students for note-taking during or after your presentation, then consider keeping slides focused on summaries and visual explanations and leave more detailed information in the notes section of your slides or in the course’s reading material.

You should now have a solid outline or basic slide deck of what you’d like to teach, what you won’t, the order you’ll teach it in, and the amount of time you’ll have for each section. Whether you’re working from a new outline or starting with an existing presentation, then your next step is to edit for scope.

Scope: Breadth, Depth, Duration, and Level

  • If you are short on time or long on slides, the first thing you should look at is whether you’re out of scope – too broad or narrow, too deep or shallow, or too advanced or simplified. Most scope issues in MD education are too broad, deep, or advanced. (reducing extraneous processing)
  • If your slides are getting lost in the weeds, sidetracked, off-topic, ultra-specialized, long-winded, generally irrelevant to current student learning, or out of the bounds of your learning objectives, cut them out of your presentation. (reducing extraneous processing)
  • Check with your block director and your teaching colleagues if you have questions about appropriate breadth, depth, or level. Teaching undergraduate medical students information that is only relevant to residents and fellows probably falls into extraneous processing.
  • Do a practice run-through or two to estimate how much time you need for each slide and section you can more accurately plan for time. Time management during your session is critical to covering what you’d like to, so allow yourself some flexibility for questions and additional explanations. (fostering generative processing)

Back to top

Designing Your Slides

Using PowerPoint as a Presentation Tool and Study Material

Due to our setting, instructor slide decks are used both in class as a tool for presenting and outside of class as a tool for student studying. Because of this, many of these recommendations include ways to make the slides good study material as well as a great presentation.

Slide Content

  • Keep slides straightforward and non-dense. They are often best used for summary information or visual illustrations and explanations, with details contained in the notes or in the course syllabus. (reducing extraneous processing)
  • You generally want to show and tell about the same thing at the same time. If your slide has so much information on it that some text is sitting on screen for longer than a minute or two without comment, you should move that content to the next slide, and advance to it when you are ready to comment on it. This is in keeping with reducing extraneous processing and the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning. 
  • *If a concept needs to be remembered, it should be written down on the slide. There is not always time to write down everything the professor says. (fostering generative processing)
  • *If the lecture omits concepts from the syllabus, these concepts should be listed at the end of the lecture for later review. Add a slide for “other session resources” that lists any other materials related to the presentation session. (fostering generative processing)
  • *Summary slides with big-picture concepts are an invaluable resource, and greatly improve study efficiency. (fostering generative processing)

Animations

  • *Avoid PPT Animations which Overlap
    • *Many professors prefer to use animations in PPT. This allows them to present ideas one at a time. There’s nothing inherently problematic about animations.
    • *However, oftentimes these animations have figures and images which overlap one another. This is problematic for the student.
      • *Animations only work in Presenter Mode.
      • *When the student prints the PPT to take notes, either on paper, or into OneNote, or as a PDF, any overlapping animations obscure one another.
  • If you currently have overlapping animations, consider breaking them up into separate slides where each figure is clearly visible. This is also generally good for slide density.

Images, Charts, Graphs, and Video

  • Show (graphs, charts, illustrations) rather than tell whenever possible. PowerPoint at its best is a visual tool. Remember that you generally want to present corresponding narration and images together. If the image is labeled, the labels should ideally physically next to the parts of the image they describe. (reducing extraneous processing)
  • Avoid using clip art, animations, and other visual elements that are unrelated to the slide’s content or are otherwise only tenuously connected. This is particularly important on slides that already contain a lot of information. (reducing extraneous processing)
  • Use high-quality images, illustrations and data representations whenever possible. Consider making your point visually, and refer to this list of multimedia resources for content. (fostering generative processing)

Bullets and Lists

  • Consider breaking bulleted lists up into separate slides for each point as they are introduced verbally. If you expect to talk about each bullet for longer than a minute or two, put them each on a separate slide. If it’s important to see the entire list at once, then consider a summary slide as well. The idea is to not have any text or images on screen that you will not be covering yet. (managing essential processing and reducing extraneous processing)

Readability Tips

  • Generally keep backgrounds to a simple, neutral solid color or gradient that does not interfere with text. Choose dark colors for fonts, particularly black. Title slides are one exception and could have an image as a background (reducing extraneous processing). This is especially important for colorblind learners.
  • Use 20pt fonts or larger for all primary text. Text such as footnotes or trivial labels may be smaller.

Back to top

Presenting to Students

Managing Cognitive Load with Connections, Overviews, and Summaries

Context is everything, and in learning it’s as important as anything. Providing brief and frequent commentary to connect, summarize, contextualize, and check for understanding is critical to a good presentation. Here are some general tips to help you keep your audience on the same page:

  1. Begin your presentation with reference to any existing knowledge your learners may have related to your subject. Connecting it to something they already know is powerful for learning. This is related to the educational practice of “scaffolding“ and is also part of fostering generative processing.
  2. Quickly preview the structure of your presentation and the topics you’ll discuss for your learners. This is also a part of scaffolding, and helps them build a mental organizational model for what they are about to take in. This is another example of fostering generative processing.
  3. Be clear about what you will cover. This can help keep you and students on track throughout the presentation. It’s great when something interesting or serendipitous comes up, but not necessarily at the expense of essential content. Use a “Parking Lot” for questions you or others could follow up on later. (reducing extraneous processing)
  4. Stop to summarize sections of information and check for student understanding. Research tells us that using focused “mini-lectures” of 10-15 minutes of content before stopping to summarize is a good idea because this is a sweet spot for managing essential processing. It allows us to close an area of information before moving on to another. For ways to check for understanding, see CLIME’s Classroom Teaching page including think-pair-share and cold call
    Loader Loading...
    EAD Logo Taking too long?

    Reload Reload document
    | Open Open in new tab

    Download

    . This helps to manage essential processing and foster generative processing.
  5. As you wrap up, summarize the learning goals you covered and check that students also felt they were covered. This is a good way to confirm that you’re covering what you think are and that students are able to follow it. This is another example of fostering generative processing and allows you to make sure students learned what you wanted them to.
  6. Allow time for questions, clarifications, and corrections in class. Leaving students with no time for for follow-ups, questions or clarifications directly after a presentation means you’re wasting one of the best opportunities to check for understanding and lock in their learning. Make this a priority for your time.
  7. Always look for and allow for points where students can summarize, reflect, and give their working memory a reset. If you cram too much into a session, you’ll dramatically decrease the chance that student learn any of the content. Remember that you can always relay additional information after class, but checking for understanding and connection is much more effective in person. This is beneficial to managing essential processing and fostering generative processing – both related to Cognitive Load theory.

Back to top

Examples and Further Information

Practical Tips For Large Group Presentations Using PowerPoint – by Dr. Andy Luks

Example #1

Example #2 

Back to top