ARCS and PowerPoint

Would Keller use PowerPoint for ARCS model for motivation?

A former Berkeley PhD student, Bob Gaskins, created software called Presenter. The name Presenter changed to PowerPoint due to a trademark problem. The first version of PowerPoint was released in 1987 for Apple Macintosh. It only supported black and white slides, which were then photocopied to create overhead slides. Microsoft bought the company Forethought and eventually released the first Microsoft and DOS versions of PowerPoint in 1988. PowerPoint joined the Microsoft Office suite in 1990.

Keller’s ARCS model of motivation includes the A for attention, R for relevance, C for confidence and S for satisfaction. PowerPoint comes to mind as the ultimate tool to provide the ARCS motivation to our students. Or is it?

PowerPoint will only entertain, rather than educate, students (Szabo, p.187). Szabo et al. presented information from three (3) different studies around the benefits of PowerPoint and learning. The timelines were from 1996 to 1999.

PowerPoint provided a stimulation of attention with colors, chunked information via bullet points, pre-organization of the information and the use of fonts (Szabo, p.177). Considering this information, the researches deduced that replacing the blackboards with PowerPoint would be the appropriate action. However, after looking at the results of tests that were conducted between two groups, the test differences were not statistically significant.

Nevertheless, 85% of the students confirmed that using PowerPoint in lectures is more interesting (relevant, satisfaction) than ordinary lectures (Szabo, p.179).

It is now 2005 and counting; PowerPoint had become the mainstream tool for corporate education. These studies were done in the late 90’s when overhead lecturing was the norm.

The use of PowerPoint is clearly not the only tool to educate. The ultimate tool for motivating students is to use a variety of teaching techniques that would meet the various learning styles of the students.

References:
Wikipedia. Microsoft PowerPoint [On-line]. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPoint

Szabo,A.,7&Hastings,N.(2000). Using IT in the undergraduate classroom: should we replace the blackboard with PowerPoint?.Computers & Education 35(2000),175-187.