Relevant word identification on PowerPoint slides: Using irrelevant information to aid the identification process

Learning strategies are designed to reduce cognitive load and help students organize and integrate important information for later recall; however, students must first select the appropriate information to integrate. Thus, careful development of selection strategies to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information is necessary for successful application. In a prior study, we found that specific feedback as students learned to identify relevant information positively influenced students' abilities to identify relevant words on a set of PowerPoint slides. In this study, we extended those findings to determine how feedback on irrelevant word identification would affect the detection of relevant words on a set of PowerPoint slides. We found that provision of feedback on irrelevant word identification yielded a similar pattern of results as when students from the prior study received feedback on relevant word identification. Specifically, we found that specific feedback helped students increase their relevant word identification accuracy, and that accuracy was higher on slides that contained a higher relevant to total word ratio versus slides with a lower relevant to total word ratio, regardless of condition. Helping students learn to identify irrelevant information did not lead to higher relevant word identification performance than students in the previous study who learned to identify relevant information; however, it also did not interfere with the identification process as we had originally predicted. These findings are important for shaping a more complete understanding of the identification process employed by students when implementing various study techniques.