Erfolgreich Präsentieren in der Wissenschaft? Empirische Untersuchungen zur kommunikativen und kognitiven Wirkung von Präsentationen

In multimodal scholarly presentations supported by presentation software, spoken and written language, various visualizations on the projected slides as well as the contributors’ gestures and facial expressions build a meaningful oneness. On the one hand, communication scientists as well as linguists have for a relatively long time neglected the presentation as a complex form of communication. On the other hand, since Tafte (2003 ), columnists of major German newspapers have been dealing with the question of the value, the quality and the place of PowerPoint in science, they have even tried to find the answer to the question whether PowerPoint is evil or not. The presentation practice is perceived as fundamentally deficient of systematic empirical research on presentations. Also Grabowski called attention to this desideratum with two critical articles (Grabowski 2003, 2008). Various questions - still unanswered - have motivated the implementation of a number of experiments (in the summer of 2010) for analyzing the knowledge and learning effects and the communicational impact of scientific presentations. The general aim of these experiments was to conduct empirical research on selected presentations in order to find out what kind of presentation is successful. The main interest is to find out which model of scholarly presentation produces the best results regarding learning effect and communicative impact