The “text reveal” function in PowerPoint is a common technique for displaying information point by point during a presentation. However, Edward Tufte’s essay, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” (Graphics Press, November 2004) proclaims this to be an unnecessary “spoon-feeding” of the information, and learners are better served by presenting the information in its entirety. I have seen a difference of opinion on this issue among Media Specialists and would like to conduct some research into this and other variables in presentation design.

Some of the experiments include the violations of expectations model where one actually does project irrelevant information ahead of time. If what my colleague John Hall (Media Specialist, University of Arizona) thinks is true, and if you aurally provide a very important fact simultaneous to the revelation of irrelevant visual information, he predicts a drop in the recall by the audience of that aural information and a significant increase in recall of the visual information because it IS incongruent; out of place.

One counterargument with the approach Tufte and myself suggest would be that at least all the incongruent information is out of the way early and then the audience member is free to focus on the arguments being presented and not spend time trying to resolve the irrelevant visual information — or even more promising — maybe they DO spend time trying to resolve the irrelevance but in the process they have to attend in greater detail to the aural presentation to make the counterarguments. And what is the impact of handouts (which are usually a duplicate of the presentation) when they are provided to the audience prior to the lecture?

Then there’s the whole line of research that shows (this is mostly Clark and Mayer stuff with e-learning which of course is a single user context) that satisfaction goes up when the audience has a perception of control (in this case being able to read ahead) but that user learning drops significantly.

Learners simply don’t make consistently good decisions when they’re left to their own devices to extract what’s important. So the audience actually might have to be spoon fed IF and only if you really want them to take home a specific point.

Anyway, Dr. Hall and myself are interested in conducting a research program that doesn’t rely upon the one-shot case studies like Nielson’s stuff tends to be, and we’re looking for interested parties to participate and discuss this and other issues (such as the whole bullets vs. no bullets thing that Tufte also promotes).

Thoughts?