Improving Retention of Information from Teaching Slides

The purpose of this study was to test a new slide design in a computer science course. Slides in the new design have a sentence headline supported by visual evidence, as opposed to the traditional design of a phrase headline supported by a bulleted list and sometimes an image. Identical content was presented to two sections of students. Each group viewed three presentations. For the first two topics, one section was taught with sentence/visual slides and the other with phrase/bullets slides. The last presentation was a control; both sections viewed traditional slides. To test how much information was transferred and retained by the two sets of students, identical closed-book quizzes were administered at the end of each teaching session. Students who viewed slides in the new design performed better on the quizzes than students who viewed traditional slides. Educators should consider adopting this new design for their slides