PowerPoint’s power in the classroom: enhancing students’ self-efficacy and attitudes.

Impact on students’ achievement

The most interesting results of this study pertain to the difference between the students’ subjective and objective performance. The results imply that accompanying lectures with PowerPoint presentations does not significantly affect student achievement. Although the PowerPoint lectures were perceived as more organized and easier to understand, they did not enhance the students’ performance on exams. It should be noted that as the professor was lecturing to each section from identical notes and attempting to provide similar content, the typical organizational benefits of accompanying lectures with PowerPoint presentations might have been minimized.

Students in the study received one lecture in a traditional format and one accompanied by PowerPoint. The results of the current study imply that lecture format not only does not affect academic performance when students have limited exposure to each teaching format but also when it is manipulated over the course of a semester. Thus, when students are taught via both traditional and multimedia lectures, their academic performance is not dependent on lecture format.

Although the participants believed that they were more capable students with PowerPoint, their performance on the exams was not affected by the presence or absence of multimedia presentations. This pattern of results found that students believed PowerPoint was useful for learning although it did not affect their grades. These findings raise the question of why PowerPoint enhances students’ self-efficacy beliefs but not their performance. One possibility is that although PowerPoint’s structure and organization led to the perception of improved note taking, this might have been a subjective rather than objective reality.

Second, lecture format did not seem to influence the students’ studying behavior. This may reflect one of the limitations of PowerPoint. One study argued that whereas PowerPoint structures the content of lectures, it does not structure how students interact with the material outside of the classroom. Alternatively, responses to this question may reflect the impact of outside forces. For example, students may find the time they can spend studying for any single class to be limited, regardless of their enthusiasm or perceived knowledge on the subject matter.

However, these findings are in conflict with a number of other studies that show that accompanying lectures with PowerPoint presentations improved students’ performance. As the current research is split between studies that find beneficial effects on performance and those that do not, it may be time to conduct more fine-grained analyses rather than only assessing whether the presence or absence of multimedia influences performance. Researchers should examine the effects of specific features of PowerPoint such as the availability of on-line notes or the use of graphics, animation, and videos in these presentations. Such studies may be able to assess the conditions under which PowerPoint enhances students’ academic performance.

Impact on students’ attitudes and self-efficacy

Both students’ responses to the attitude questionnaire and their open ended comments reflected greater positive attitudes and self-efficacy beliefs when PowerPoint accompanied lectures. As expected, the students claimed that when PowerPoint was used, the lectures were more organized and their main points were emphasized more. This perception of organization impacted the students’ self-efficacy beliefs. They believed it was easier to follow and understand the lectures accompanied by PowerPoint, which made it easier for them to take notes, and to organize, understand, and use those notes for test preparation. In addition, the students perceived the classes with PowerPoint as more interesting and entertaining.

The current findings show that the use of PowerPoint multimedia improves students’ self-efficacy concerning note taking capabilities even when notes were not available in advance. This extends the previous findings that found accompanying lectures with PowerPoint while also providing PowerPoint handouts aided students’ self-efficacy concerning note taking. As PowerPoint allows information to be easily presented in bulleted format, students may be more confident that they are recording the main points of the lecture. Future research should examine whether PowerPoint affects students’ note taking not just their self-efficacy.

There were a few areas where PowerPoint did not have a positive influence. In addition to the aforementioned null results for the amount of time studying, students claimed they were more motivated to attend PowerPoint lectures, however, they did not feel worse missing them. As they believed it was easier to take useful notes from these lectures, they may have felt that other students’ notes would be better with PowerPoint as well. Therefore, it may have been viewed as less detrimental to skip class and borrow someone else’s notes when PowerPoint was used than when it was not. Thus, students’ greater interest in attending PowerPoint lectures may have been balanced by the lesser negative ramification of missing those classes.

A number of students reported that lectures with PowerPoint were less spontaneous and discussed fewer tangents. The perception of structure and organization in PowerPoint lectures may have led students to view these lectures as more pre-planned and less spontaneous, even if there were no differences in the amount of tangential information covered. Alternatively, because of the formal structure of PowerPoint presentations, students may have been less willing to interrupt the professor. In a similar fashion, although the professor attempted to provide identical content during the PowerPoint and traditional lectures, spontaneity may have been reduced in the PowerPoint lectures because the sequence of slides makes it hard to jump from point to point. Hence, PowerPoint’s format may have reduced the number of tangents introduced by either the students or the professor. To examine this issue, researchers could attend lectures on the same material taught in both traditional and PowerPoint formats to examine the spontaneity of the class interactions.

Furthermore, as self-efficacy is theorized to influence students’ choice of tasks, their persistence, and effort in addition to affecting academic achievement, future research should assess behavioral measures of students’ effort and persistence such as their attendance, classroom participation, and how they study for exams in order to examine why students feel more competent with PowerPoint yet do not perform better with it.

The current results not only replicate previous findings of positive attitudes and enhanced self-efficacy when PowerPoint accompanied lectures but also improve the validity of these claims. A number of these studies lacked a comparison group of alternative lectures whereas in others, students compared the PowerPoint lectures to traditional lectures in other courses. Further, there may be strong demand characteristics to provide positive evaluations of PowerPoint lectures in both of these designs. Although there may be demand characteristics to provide favorable evaluations for PowerPoint lectures in the current study, this effect should be smaller as the professor did not specify a preference for either lecture style.

Impact on students’ motivation

Students that received traditional instruction first and then received lectures with PowerPoint did not experience a change in classroom motivation. However, students who were initially taught with PowerPoint and then received traditional lectures became less motivated during the traditional lecture format. These students may have perceived the professor’s decision to stop using PowerPoint as reflecting a decrease in the effort he applied to preparing lectures. If the professor was not seen as interested in the class, it is not surprising that the students’ motivation also declined. This suggests that if instructors regularly implement technology, they should not abandon it mid-semester. Regardless of whether the technology achieves the effect that the instructor desires, it affects the students significantly enough such that its absence may generate decreases in enthusiasm and even participation in the class. However, as there does not seem to be a problem with introducing technology midway through the semester, instructors can start using PowerPoint presentations at any point in the course as long as they continue to use the technology for the duration of the course.

Students’ attitudes, self-efficacy beliefs, and motivation were influenced by non-interactive computer technology. This interpretation is contingent on the study’s limitations. Although many professors may use the traditional format described here, it is likely that many instructors use equipment such as overheads and additional handouts. Because this study compared only the traditional format to multimedia PowerPoint presentations, it is unclear whether the observed effects were due to the use of the computer medium or the organization and structure that is facilitated by PowerPoint. Future research should compare multimedia PowerPoint presentations to the same PowerPoint slides printed on overheads to determine whether the computer medium establishes differences in motivation and self-efficacy.

Furthermore, there are issues regarding the sample. First, group equivalence was not possible as the current study was field research. There are potential group differences in abilities, previous exposure to PowerPoint, motivation, etc. Second, as both sections had small class sizes, these results may not generalize for courses with greater numbers of students. There is reason to expect these findings may be weaker when there are large class sizes, PowerPoint’s effect on students’ performance was reduced by 50% when it was used in an auditorium.

Results of this study provide reason to believe that non-interactive computer assisted instruction yields more subjective effects than objective ones. However, this remains an empirical question. Thus, additional research should attempt to understand the manner in which computer technology influences student outcomes. Such research will help to develop a more complex and integrated understanding of education theory and instructional strategies.