BPS research reports an interesting study that suggests, as usually seems to be the case, that students know what helps them learn better than their teachers. I have heard quite a few professors argue that, when they do a PowerPoint presentation, they don't want to pass-out the slides before the talk because students flip ahead, don't pay close attention, don't take good notes and — in some cases — because they think the students ought to pay for the copies (although with the web, that argument goes away because you can just post them on a website). Not all faculty are so down on passing out the PowerPoints before: The study reported at BPS found that 50% of lecturers preferred to give handouts before, while the other half was split between lecturers who distributed them afterward or not at all. The students had more consistent opinions, with 74% preferring to get the handouts before the lecture.
The interesting part is the follow-up, where, in the first experiment, there was no significant difference in test performance between students who got handouts before or after the lecture. But, after tweaking the design a bit, they researchers did find that students who got handouts before performed better in a test given 12 minutes after the lecture. Another interesting twist was that, in both sets of experiments, students who did not get handouts before took more notes. As BPS reports:
The findings provide preliminary evidence that lecturers should provide
their students with handouts during the lecture. Regarding the more
extensive note-taking that took place when handouts were held back until
after a lecture, the researchers speculated that this was 'unlikely to
be a deep encoding task', which would normally be expected to aid memory
retention, and may instead have acted merely acted as a distraction.
This is, as they say, preliminary research. The first study did not reveal much, but the second is suggestive. For anyone who teaches, this study does suggest strong evidence that your students want the handouts first, some evidence that handing out the slides first will help them perform better, and no evidence that handing the slides out early harms their performance.
This is not an earth-shaking problem or issue, but I have been amazed too see how vehemently some faculty feel about this issue, so I am glad to see a little evidence.
The citation is: Marsh,
E., & Sink, H. (2009). Access to handouts of presentation slides
during lecture: Consequences for learning. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24 (5), 691-706
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