The Effect of Text Slides Compared to Visualizations on Learning and Appreciation in Lectures

Visual support of presentations generally consists of text or real visualizations, such as pictures and diagrams. Most speakers prefer text slides in a bullet layout. Yet their audiences like real visualizations better. The question is: which of these two types of presentation support is better in terms of learning effects? In a large-scale experiment (N=237), we tried to determine the most effective way to visually support a presentation. We used a real-life 15-minute lecture on the topic of persuasion strategies. The independent variable was the content of the slide. Regarding the slide content, we employed three variations: •no visual support•slides with text•slides with real visualizations (diagrams, pictures etcetera) The dependent variables were a multiple-choice questionnaire to measure the comprehension of the listeners, and a Likert-like questionnaire to measure the attitudes of the listeners regarding presentation and slides. The outcome of this experiment suggests that, from a learning point of view, text slides support a presentation at least as well as visualizations, and that text on the slides does not need to be concise. But although listeners learn more from text slides, they prefer the visual kind significantly.