Previously submitted to: JMIR Medical Education (no longer under consideration since Apr 19, 2021)
Date Submitted: Jul 17, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The Applied Weighted Slide Metric (AWSM) Tool: Creation of a Standard Slide Design Rubric
ABSTRACT
Background:
Lectures are a standard aspect across all realms of medical education. Previous studies have shown that visual design of presentation slides can affect learner outcomes.
Objective:
The purpose of this study was to develop a rubric that addresses multiple aspects of slide design. Our goal was to create a rubric grounded in evidence-based, multimedia principles to enable objective evaluation of slide design. The various principles were selected based on previous evidence, and we created a survey to collect opinions of other experts in the field to assign weighted values to each principle.
Methods:
Using the principles described in Mayers’ Principles of Multimedia Learning and Duarte’s Slide:ology, the authors extracted nineteen items important for slide design. We developed an online survey tool to identify the importance of each item among medical educators. Respondents selected which slide design principles they felt were important when attending a lecture/didactic session and ranked their relative importance.
Results:
We received 235 responses to the survey. When asked to specifically rank elements from most important to least important, participants gave the most weight to “readability of figures and data” and “[lack of] busy-ness of slide”, as shown in Figure 1. The lowest ranked elements were “transitions and animations” and “color schemes”. Using the results of the survey, including the free response, we developed a rubric with relative weighting that followed our survey data.
Conclusions:
Our goal was to create a slide design rubric that assesses the quality of slide decks for medical educators. While the initial components were selected by an expert panel of medical educators based on established multimedia principles and expert opinion, we developed the survey to collect further information from the medical educator community to ensure various aspects of the rubric were appropriately weighted. With this information we have applied values to the various aspects of the rubric for a total score of 100. We hope that this rubric can be used for self-assessment or to evaluate and improve slides for educators. Future research will be focused on implementing and validating the slide design survey and ensuring it is easily usable with a high inter-rater reliability and whether self-assessment with the rubric improves presentation content and design and improves education quality. Clinical Trial: n/a
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