WHY TURKISH PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS PREFER TO SEE POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS IN THEIR CLASSES

Abstract

PowerPoint has become very popular presentation software used in educational settings. The literature indicates that the effectiveness of PowerPoint presentations is inconclusive and that students have positive attitudes toward PowerPoint presentations. However, the question why students prefer to see PowerPoint in their classes is still in discussion. Therefore, the purposes of the study are to investigate pre-service teachers' attitudes toward PowerPoint presentations, understand the reasons why they prefer to see PowerPoint presentations in their future classes, and present their suggestions about the ways to improve the quality and usefulness of PowerPoint presentations. "Presentation Software Survey: Student Perspective" (Frey & Birnbaum, 2002) was used in order to collect data for this study. The survey contains 12-item Likert type questions and two open-ended questions. The data were collected from 211 pre-service teachers studying at three different departments in one of the large Turkish Universities. The findings of the study indicated that the majority of the participants prefer to see PowerPoint presentations in their future classes for helping them study for the course exams and providing the long term retention of knowledge. More than half of the participants suggest that more visuals, pictures, and videos should be used in PowerPoint presentations.