The Point of PowerPoint in SophLit

1. Failures in the 1997 study

Through teamwork and experimentation, our study has been encouraging. It may help other investigators to know some things we tried in fall 1997 that did not work. We will summarize that phase of our study as a cautionary tale.

In fall 1997, both Mimi and Jana taught two sections each of Major British Writers I (English 221) and Major British Writers II (English 222); one class for each was the PowerPoint class and one class was the control group. That much was similar to our fall 1998 study. But there were several differences.

• In the 1997 study, the teachers had little influence on the presentations. Chris and a student (an intern in the Digital Media program) produced the presentations.
• We showed the presentations on large television monitors in each classroom, for lack of a data projector.
• We were not able to control for classroom environment. Neither teacher could meet both her classes in the same room.
• We used the presentations as lecture enhancements, not preparation for reading. Each presentation covered the literary work assigned for that day and was shown at the beginning of class. The presentations were somewhat lengthy and were designed to illustrate a 20- to 30-minute portion of the lecture.
• We collected data on a different schedule. Students filled out surveys two days after seeing the PowerPoint show, at the next class meeting. Our rationale was that they would read the poem/story/play on their own, probably be a little confused, and, in class, have it clarified and interpreted. At the next class period, they would have read further and settled their feelings about that author's work. Those students who had been exposed to PowerPoint would turn out to be better and more confident readers.
• A last difference was that in our 1997 classes, we framed our problem and its evaluation differently. To measure the benefit of the PowerPoint shows, we sought help from the psychology department. In discussion with Dr. Robert McKelvain and a graduate student, Peter Underwood, we framed our pedagogical problem as a marketing problem.

With this conception, we chose assessment instruments to fit our assumption about presentation media--that we ought to be able to use media as advertisers did to improve understanding and appreciation of our product. Here was our hypothesis in 1997: Students who viewed the PPT presentation would report more positively on all five variables (Interest, Importance, Relevance, Understanding, and Entertainment) than students who received only lecture. The assessment instruments were questionnaires adapted from The Handbook of Marketing Scales.

Sample Questions (fall 1997): Interest, Importance [total 14 scales]

Sample Questions: Relevance, Understanding, Entertainment [total 15 statements]

agree strongly

agree somewhat

agree

disagree

disagree somewhat

disagree strongly

 

2. The play did not have anything to do with me or my needs.

3. The play was too complex; I was not sure what was going on.

The data we received from these questionnaires were disappointing. Students' responses showed virtually no difference in effectiveness between straight lecture and PPT-enhanced lecture. Our psychologist friends offered three possible reasons for its failure. The technology could have been irrelevant; it could have been poorly suited to our teaching-learning method; or that the assessment tools were not appropriate.

Thus we had a solid list of things to change when we were ready to plan our fall 1998 study, First was to solve problems with our facilities. Having one television monitor for a class of 28-30 students had seemed awkward during our courses; in retrospect, we saw that it was much worse than awkward, The room was long and narrow, and some students simply couldn't see the pictures and text very well. Small wonder that their perceptions weren't changed. Beyond this, we knew we needed to change the length and the timing of the presentations, control the environment better, and rethink our assessment procedure.

We made these changes in 1998, the most significant being the choice to use the PPT presentation for pre-reading presentations rather than lecture aids. We give credit to these changes for getting results that we believe are not only interesting, but meaningful.

2. Varied results in the 1998 study

In the fall 1998 study, there are several possible reasons why the statistical outcomes were different for Mimi's Major British I classes (English 221) and Jana's Major British Writers II classes (English 222). As Mimi points out in the Results section, the statistical data may vary because the 222 students had more quizzes than the 221 students; consequently, there were more data points to consider for 222. Moreover, PowerPoint presentations may be more suited for the course content of 222 than 221. In 222, students are introduced to more abstract concepts than they are in 221. For example, students in 221 discuss concepts like heroism, chivalry, and courtly love--terms with which they are familiar and with which they connect films and books they know already. As a result of that familiarity, students don't necessary need an image to enhance meaning. In 222, students are introduced to concepts like neoplatonism, transcendentalism, empiricism, naturalism, post-modernism, etc.--terms that are less concrete and less widely known or understood. Appropriate images seemed to help us communicate these terms. We are not discouraged by the lack of statistical difference in 221, and plan to review and revise the presentations for this course as we launch the next phase of our study.

We believe that in both courses each PPT presentation improved student interest in and comprehension of challenging material. The presentations on Carlyle and Ruskin in English 222, however, seemed particularly effective. Students struggle with Carlyle's Past and Present and Ruskin's The Stones of Venice not only because of authors' Victorian style and vocabulary, but also because the dominant metaphors in each work are unfamiliar. As Jana notes in the Results section, Gothic architecture is a wonderful metaphor only to students who know what Gothic architecture is. With images from PPT, the metaphors came to life, and so did the students.

Our next collaborative step is two-fold: promoting the use of PowerPoint presentation among our diverse faculty and having access, all over campus, to multi-media classrooms.

The first is easy: we will be able to promote the use of PPT presentations and generate enthusiasm as we share our PPT presentations with other interested English department faculty and present our findings to university faculty in a variety of disciplines. An increasing number of our colleagues are innovative, and our university has as its focus this year to "raise the standard" in teaching and in student learning. What we're doing in a small way in our literature classes fits our larger university mission. We have excellent support.

The second step is in the works: our department has funded and is working on creating a multi-media classroom, complete with a big screen and projector, a sound system, ethernet connections to provide server access, a digitizing document camera, and video cameras. Teachers will be allowed to reserve time slots for using this classroom, and it will be equally shared by all English department faculty. But we still dream of the day when every classroom is a multi-media classroom . . .

On a personal note, one benefit of both the 1997 and 1998 studies was that we learned to work together like our friends in the sciences: that is, to collaborate and to learn from failures. Literature programs still push the Lone Wolf model of scholarship and have no idea what to do with failure. Only our composition and pedagogy people have made the breakthrough and learned to thrive on teamwork and experimentation. The gains we made in the 1998 study owe directly to our copying their example.

Introduction

Method

Results

Discussion