Slide structure can influence the presenter’s understanding of the presentation’s content

Many undergraduate engineering programs use presentations as a means of assessing students’ learning and technicalcommunication skills, but the task of identifying slide structures that foster the presenter’s thinking about his or her topichas received little attention. In most cases, students create topic-subtopic structure slides that follow the default settings ofprograms such as Microsoft PowerPoint. Our study explored the premise that the structure of a slide can also influence thepresenter’s understanding of the content. We asked 120 undergraduate engineering students to create slides that could beused to teach other students how MRI scans work. Roughly half of the participants (n = 59) were tasked with creatingassertion-evidence slides. In the other condition, 61 participants created slides using a structure of their choosing. Morethan 80 percent from this second group created topic-subtopic slides. Within 24 hours, we gave the participants anunannounced post-test of comprehension. Results revealed a statistically significant advantage (p < 0.05) for participantswho created assertion-evidence slides. Two takeaways from our study are (1) that the assertion-evidence structure led to astatistically significant increase in the presenter’s understanding of the content, and (2) that the instruction needed to teachthe assertion-evidence approach to the student presenters was minimal.