We’ve all heard the saying that practice makes perfect, so it only makes sense that asking students to practice for the end-of-semester presentations will help them improve. But does it? Can practice hinder as much as it helps?
Students Need a Goal to Practice
Research tells us that practice only helps when students know what they’re aiming for. If they don’t have a clear sense of their goal, no amount of practice will get them there.
Think for a moment about the use of slides in student presentations. By the time students get to your class, they’ve probably seen countless bad PowerPoint decks with slides crammed with text that the presenter reads from. If you want them to do something different, give them a different goal to aim for:
What do effective slides look like?
How should presenters interact with their slides?
Are their particular conventions in your field for style of slides or use of images, charts and other figures?
You can help them learn even more by giving them feedback on whether they’re on the right track. This does not have to be a formal assignment. You could, for example, take the advice of James Lang in Small Teaching and spend the last ten minutes of class asking students to work in small groups to create a single slide about the day’s content and then give feedback to a couple of groups so others can assess themselves. You could also ask students to post one slide to a discussion board so you can highlight a few that are models for others to follow.
Practice Improves Performance … Over-Practice Does Not
When students are new to presenting, there are so many aspects of the task that they need to think about that it can overwhelm their working memories:
- Speaking loudly
- Speaking clearly
- Speaking slowly
- Standing still
- Gesturing appropriately
- Referring to slides without reading them
- Advancing slides at the right time
- Gauging their audience
- Not to mention … speaking about the topic
Practice can help them put some of these skills—standing still and speaking loudly, for example—on auto pilot. That is a good thing because it can free up their working memory to focus on the actual speech they are giving.
But sometimes students over-practice a presentation so that they’ve learned it by rote. While this technique might improve that particular performance, it is unlikely to lead to deep learning. Students who have learned a presentation by rote are less able to adapt if something unexpected happens. They are also less able to apply what they’ve learned to future presentations.
Switch it Up
Research shows that you can help them learn presentation skills in a deeper way by asking them to vary their practice:
- Alter the pace
- Practice with notes and without
- Imagine the audience reacting in different ways
- Varied practice can help them learn the skills they’ll need to make the presentation better in your course and in the future.
Resources
Ambrose, Susan A. et al. How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Practices for Smart Teaching (2010)
Lang, James M. Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (2016)
Langer, Ellen J. The Power of Mindful Learning (2016)