The PowerPoint presentation

Write full sentences, not only keywords: The presentation should provide guidelines for the students here and now and when they prepare for their exam. Furthermore, the students should be able to read the presentation during the lecture if they have lost the thread and want to quickly get back on track; in such a case, keywords alone are useless.

Use an adequate font and font size:

• The font should be a sans serif font, without ‘feet’ (as e.g. Times New Roman has feet). Verdana is a good choice. It was originally developed for screen use with a good width and space between the individual letters (in contrast to e.g. Arial).
• The size should be at least 24.

Do not overload the slides. Rather, distribute information over more slides. As a rule of thumb, you should never have more than 5 bullet points per slide in order to accommodate the working memory of the students. In this respect, Verdana in size 24 is a good choice, for it leaves space only for 4-5 bullet points.

Use animations on the individual slides so that each bullet point appears separately. This lets the students focus on what is relevant right now – again the feeble working memory is taken into consideration.

Avoid animations at transitions between slides – they only disturb.

Use the same layout for all slides. Limit the amount of colours to two: one for the background and one for other purposes (e.g. stressing information). Colours are information just like text, and they will be processed by the working memory, too. Avoid blue letters on a white background – blue letters are difficult to see. Use black letters.

Pictures and all types of graphics should be exploited as much as possible – both as individual slides and on slides next to the text. Pictures are processed by the brain as one and only one information unit even though they contain lots of details. Thus, they support the working memory: The many pieces of information are gathered in one information unit. They also support the long-term memory: It is easier to retrieve one unit with lots of details than to retrieve the details one by one.