Australian professors at the University of NSW have done some significant PowerPoint research. If you ever get bored watching a PowerPoint presentation while someone is talking, then you're not alone, and there's a scientific reason behind this. Scientists have discovered that people learn best when given media on paper or verbal media. A combination of the two tends to cause a brain overload, mixes the two forms of information, and can hurt a lot more than it can help. This is due to the fact that the brain can only handle two or three tasks at once, and otherwise will start to budget time away from some tasks to help others Professor Sweller says that "It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."[---]
These findings then go on to challenge things that have been tradition for centuries. First, this shows that if we balance, say, AIM, Windows Media Player, and a History essay, we would pay less attention to the much-more-important History essay. More importantly, these findings challenge the way we teach our children. While most school teachers use a combination of written and verbal methods to teach curriculum (usually combining both at once), the proven better approach is to present the curriculum in an either purely verbal or purely written form.
Source: The Age
These findings then go on to challenge things that have been tradition for centuries. First, this shows that if we balance, say, AIM, Windows Media Player, and a History essay, we would pay less attention to the much-more-important History essay. More importantly, these findings challenge the way we teach our children. While most school teachers use a combination of written and verbal methods to teach curriculum (usually combining both at once), the proven better approach is to present the curriculum in an either purely verbal or purely written form.
Source: The Age
