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Top1. Introduction
MS PowerPoint (PP) as an instrument was initially designed for Macintosh in 1984 and then it was purchased by Microsoft (Gaskins, 2012). Over the years, the number of educators who use PowerPoint presentations (PPP) for teaching has become overwhelming because PP has been the most famous means of making up presentations. Indeed, PP is installed on more than 1 billion computers (Brock, 2017).
However, no consensus has been reached if presentations are worth employing in educational process.
On the one hand, (Fedisson & Braidic, 2007) describes an experiment dedicated to evaluation of PPP effectiveness. The results of this experiment prove that the use of PPP increases the students' level of comfort and, subsequently, improves their performance.
On the other hand, (Kedare et al., 2019) described an experiment where students who completed the course using the traditional teaching method (chalk, blackboard, lecture) showed better results compared to their counterparts who used PowerPoint presentations. This study confirms the idea that conventional lecture can be evaluated as more comprehensible and informative, since such lectures may create interactive learning environments in which pieces of slides are excluded (Cosgun, 2017).
Recent meta-analysis (Baker et al., 2018) has shown that there was hardly any difference in learning results when employing PPP or not. In (Kernbach et al., 2015) identifies some deterrent measures for PPP. In particular, full length sentences are hard to be put on the PPP slides to hold the sence (Farkas, 2009) and understanding (Yates & Orlikowski, 2007). Popular bullet lists foster an illusion of clarity and do not show the whole picture (Gabriel, 2008). Meanwhile, (Jenkins, 2012) studies the debates about the need to apply PPP.
Therefore, instead of contemplating on whether to use this tool, it appears that we should concentrate on how and when it should be used to help students in the learning process (Jourdan & Papp, 2013). Besides these two important issues, the issue of what kind of presentation it should be to help students in learning the best way is not the least important.
For example, PowerPoint can be very beneficial, but the material that is not pertinent to the lecture subject is harmful to students learning (Bartsch & Cobern, 2003). And the rise of form over content spoils the presentation (Grech, 2018). This corresponds to Mayer multimedia learning theory (Mayer, 2002). In (Hallewell & Crook, 2019) the lectures styles is analyzed and draws a conclusion that the presentation of the material should be consistent and coherent despite the individual styles of lecturers. Also the educators must use PowerPoint presentations in such a way that students understand that the presentation is supplementary to class attendance, not a replacement for it (Crawley & Frey, 2008). One way to tackle the issue is to create interactive PowerPoint presentations (Boyas, 2008).
There is a wide range of studies of PPP applications in various areas: physics (Erdemir, 2011), medicine (Grech, 2018); (Bamne & Bamne, 2016), accounting (Sugahara & Boland, 2006), astronomy (Miller & James, 2011), sociology (Hill et al., 2012), education of foreign language students (Gordani & Khajavi, 2019). Each of the disciplines needs PPP to meet its particular requirements to make students learn in the most effective way (Garrett, 2016).