Lecture Slides Design: Medical Students’ Preferences of Best Practices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Large group lectures that are centred on PowerPoint (PPT) slide presentations are a ubiquitous instructional format during the pre‐clinical years of medical schools around the world, whether delivered virtually or in‐person. However, lecturers rarely receive formal training on how to design their lecture slides to optimize student learning. Consequently, due to the large number of faculty members delivering lectures in undergraduate medical curricula, there is wide variation in slide layout and organization. Cognitive load theory provides an established rationale for standardization of this aspect of lecture delivery. To assess students’ experiences and preferences with lecture slides design, a survey was distributed to students in the MD Undergraduate Program at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada. The survey evaluated students' experiences with PPT slides in large group lectures through the entirety of their first year of medical school. Questions explored the perceived importance of lecture slides in understanding content, and satisfaction with slide formatting, quality and consistency. Over‐all, the majority of student responses rated the importance of lecture slides and their design and formatting to be “important” or “very important” elements for understanding a lecture during class (87%), and even more so for reviewing and studying after a lecture (93%). Specifically, students highlighted the need to address the quality and consistency of lecture slides in the curriculum and pointed to elements such as colour, layout, and image quality as areas for improvement. Results were used to formulate a one‐page checklist of best practices for slide design, which is now distributed to all lecturers in the UBC undergraduate medical curriculum. Major recommendations include addressing readability by using simple white backgrounds with black text, the provision of relevant and high‐quality graphics, and higher level session organization through the use of lecture objectives, tables and summary slides. Our results will be useful and of interest to all medical and allied health professionals who lecture using PPT slides.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".