LifeDev

Australian researchers have found that people don’t learn as well when they’re thrown two separate inputs to process at the same time. An example of this inadequate presentation style is the traditional Power Point presentation.   This generally consists of a prepared topic outline on the screen and the lecturer extrapolating the finer points.

“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.”

I don’t know about you, but this was the only type of instruction I got in High School. Most of my classes constituted of a furiously scribbling down whatever was on the power point, and trying to take it thde teacher’s lecture. As expected, it usually didn’t go well. In the end, I just usually wrote down what the teacher said anyway.

Another recent example of this was a museum exhibit that had you read tons of text, along with listening to other information, at the same time. Too many inputs.

via DownloadSquad