ScienceDaily (Jan. 21, 2011) — Put down those science books and work at recalling information from memory. That's the shorthand take away message of new research from Purdue University that says practicing memory retrieval boosts science learning far better than elaborate study methods. "Our view is that learning is not about studying or getting knowledge 'in memory,'" said Purdue psychology professor Jeffrey Karpicke, the lead investigator for the study that appears January 20 in the journal Science. "Learning is about retrieving.

This talk explain best practices for using PowerPoint in an educational and training environment, based on the research that has been done in the field. (A list of references follows the handout.)

Topics covered are:
Why reading from slides is detrimental to learning
The damaging effect of unnecessary images
The solution
Points from Multimedia Learning by Richard E. Mayer
Research showing that animating text line by line is not helpful to learning
How to create clear graphs/charts

One of the most famous case studies on subliminal messages happened back in 1959 when James Vicary showed a movie audience flashing images saying "eat popcorn" and "buy coca-cola". Vicary claimed that the sales of both products increased significantly as a result!

This was such a shock to the general public, and public officials alike, that it lead to subliminal messages being banned from television and radio in Australia, the USA and the UK.