Claim headline with evidence

Claim: each slide's headline is a sentence stating its claim, and the slide shows the evidence.

What it asks

  • Write the headline as a sentence of at most two lines that says what the slide shows.
  • Make the evidence a graphic or a table, placed with the words that explain it.
  • Give each slide one claim. Leave out decorative images (Sundararajan 2020).
  • Use the figure principles of the standard: draw relations and figure next to its text.

Why

Garner 2013 compared two decks in a single narrated talk of 8 minutes, with 110 undergraduate engineers assigned at random. The common deck averaged 41.5 words a slide, bullets under a topic phrase. The other averaged 21.2, a graphic under a sentence headline.

  • Essay scored with an analytic rubric: d = 0.81.
  • Unannounced sentence completion about a week later: d = 0.89.
  • Self-rated effort on 7 points: 3.01 for the sentence headlines against 3.61.

Issa 2013 found delayed transfer d = 0.83 at 1 week and 1.17 at 4 weeks for slides redesigned on Mayer's principles (abstract; random assignment not stated).

Limits

  • One experiment carries the weight: engineering students, one topic, one talk. The condition bundles six principles, so the headline, the graphic and the lower word count are not separated.
  • Immediate facts and statistics showed no difference. Viewers of the sentence headlines judged their slides to have less appropriate text than the other group did.
  • Alley, the main designer of the approach, is a coauthor of Garner 2013. Alley 2007 bundles the design with active learning.
  • Practice disagrees on the form. Beamer 2026 advises phrases over sentences. SSP 2026 limits a title to 6 words. Both agree on short slides.
  • Whether the effect holds for expert audiences, for hour-long talks and for live speakers is not known.