Does Downloading PowerPoint Slides Before the Lecture Lead to Better Student Achievement?

With the availability of new information technology, PowerPoint presentations have been used extensively in classrooms for higher education, in addition to traditional chalk-and-talk presentations. However, their effectiveness is much less clear. The main purpose of this paper is to examine whether or not downloading PowerPoint slides before a class has any impact on students' learning outcomes for that class, using a panel data set. The estimation results show a nontrivial lecture slides effect. After controlling for students' unobserved individual heterogeneity and exam difficulty, downloading lecture slides before a class improves students' examination performance by 3.48 per cent. This finding suggests that instructors could help students improve their academic performance by supplying PowerPoint slides.