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Ten Tips for Effective EMail
Effective use of the phone
Presenting Courses to be Remembered
The way in which information is presented strongly influences the way in
which an audience recalls the information presented.
You will normally be familiar with this in relation to principles of instruction:
presentation of a clear structure to the session, good use of visual aids,
etc. These principles are vital, but will be looked into in detail elsewhere
within Mind Tools. This section concentrates on memory, how information
is absorbed during lessons, and how information can be presented in a
way that fits in with the conscious or unconscious use of memory
techniques.
How information is absorbed within a presentation
The following points are important to recall of information:
- People tend to remember information most effectively that is presented
at the beginning of a session and at the end. Material in the middle,
particularly in a long presentation, can easily be lost.
-
The longer a presentation lasts, the less benefit additional information
has - the audience's concentration begins to wander and distractions
creep in. More importantly, facts are fitted into memory by being
organised into a structure in the mind, often unconsciously, during a
period when the mind is not concentrating on the subject at hand. In a
long presentation, peoples' minds become saturated with facts that they
have not had an opportunity to fit into any framework. Unstructured facts
may displace other unstructured facts, resulting in confusion.
-
Information that is effectively related to other information within the
presentation, whether by showing linkages, fitting into a structure, or
repetition is better remembered that information that stands alone.
- Recall of material is often greatest not during a period of instruction, but
10 minutes after a presentation has finished: the audience will have had
time to fit information into appropriate mental structures. After this, recall
of facts declines rapidly, so that after a number of months only a tiny
percentage of the information covered may be remembered, UNLESS
information is regularly reviewed.
- Even very quick reviews of information can be extremely effective in
the presentation of a topic, as they keep the overall framework into which
information is to be fitted fresh and alive.
- Information is most effectively remembered when the whole mind is
engaged in a presentation, not just the eyes alone or the ears alone.
Complex ideas are often easier to think about and convey by linking them
to familiar ones. An easily remembered or visualised structure aids recall.
Designing a presentation for maximum learning
These observations on the way in which information is assimilated allow
us to derive a number of principles by which presentations, lessons and
training courses can be delivered to have the maximum impact:
- Use breaks effectively - by breaking frequently, you take advantage of
the way in which the mind recalls information most effectively at the
beginning and ends of a presentation. You can take advantage of this
several times within a session, before and after each break. As a guide:
presentations of less than 20 minutes in length can be ineffective as it can
be difficult for the audience to grasp at the shape and rhythm of the
material. Presentations of more than 50 minutes in length are usually
boring and ineffective.
- Take advantage of the high initial level of assimilation and of the
heightened understanding of the final facts to present some of the most
importance information during these periods.
- Relate facts that should be remembered to other facts, and fit them into
a framework that shows their relevance. If necessary, repeat important
information.
- If the presentation is part of a series, then a brief period of time can be
spent before the presentation starts reviewing the overall structure of
previous presentations. This helps to refresh the audience's minds with
the information on which you want to build, allowing connections to be
made automatically which would otherwise be lost.
- Where possible members of the audience should be encouraged to
review information in their own time. See the article on Using Reviews to
Learn Effectively for further information.
- Try to engage the whole mind of your audience and as many of their
senses as practicable with a variety of aids. This will keep all of their
minds focussed on the learning experience rather than having unused
parts of the mind 'wandering off' and generating distractions.
- Perhaps try to fit the key information to be recalled into a mnemonic
structure. This will require that your audience understands and is
comfortable with the use of memory techniques - otherwise your
presentations may seem a little strange!
Summary
It is important to design the structure of a presentation to fit in with the
way in which your audience recalls and assimilates information. This
involves reviewing information already known, keeping presentations
relatively short while still maintaining the feeling of structure to a subject,
linking information in with a structure, and presenting or representing key
information at the beginning and end of a session.
Links
For more information:
Use Your Head, Tony Buzan, 1995, BBC Books, London, UK. ISBN 0-
563-37103-X.
Ten Tips for Effective EMail
Effective use of the phone
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