A Plan for Using a Sentence Headline Design of Presentation Slides in Science and

Engineering Education

Katrina Ramsdell
Dr. Michael Alley, Engineering Education, Virginia Tech

A new slide design that features a succinct sentence headline identifying the main
assertion of the slide rather than the traditional phrase headline has been shown to increase
audience recall of the slides’ assertions [Alley, 2005]. This experimental study, conducted in a
large geosciences course at Virginia Tech, tested a method for best using this sentence headline
design in teaching science and engineering.
The plan consisted of providing the slides to the students before and after the lecture in
which the notes were presented. Slides that were made available to the students before the lecture
included questions in place of several of the sentence headlines and were missing some key
information from the lecture with blanks to be filled in during class. Most students printed these
slides and brought them to class for taking notes. During class, the professor answered the
questions on the pre-lecture notes. She then provided students with slides that included all of the
sentence headlines and information that was missing from the pre-lecture notes after the class.
Examples of pre-lecture and post-lecture slides are shown in Figures 1 and 2. Since students had
access to the presentation slides online without going to class, a short, multiple-choice quiz was
added at the end of each class to encourage attendance and to test the retention of the most
important points from the slides immediately following the lecture.

Why do the plates move? Why domove

Plates the plates move?
because of convection caused
by heat from nuclear fission

Uranium and Thorium are large “unstable” atoms Uranium and Thorium are large “unstable” atoms

break down to produce, smaller atoms, break down to produce, smaller atoms,
heat, and radioactivity heat, and radioactivity
[Miller, 2004] [Miller, 2004]

Figure 1. Pre-lecture slide Figure 2. Post-lecture slide

This approach did seem to encourage interaction between the students and the professor,
providing the students with a more active learning process. The scores on the first quizzes were
very high, and it appeared that most of the students enrolled in the course were coming to class.
The scores from multiple-choice questions given on an exam in this course will be used to
analyze the students’ retention of the material and will be compared with scores from previous
semesters in which a traditional approach was used. Students in the class will be taking this exam
on Tuesday, September 13 and the scores from it will be available shortly thereafter.