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Appropriate Visual Aids



Introduction

During Lesson 6, we emphasized the human brain's limitations for remembering things it hears, and the fact that most people will not remember more than five key points. This lesson focuses on the use of visual aids to help people take more information and details with them after they leave the presentation room.

The chart below shows a graph from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), illustrating that a combination of visual and oral presentation techniques increases retention significantly.

Providing some form of visual aids will also help people who are more visual learners (as opposed to auditory). In other words, many folks remember things better when they have seen them than when they've heard them (See the figure above, which shows levels of retention of information three days after a meeting or other event).

Other people are kinesthetic, meaning they prefer to learn by doing. This group will benefit more from audience participation and working out a solution for themselves. A detailed discussion of learning styles is out of the scope of this lesson, but there are several interesting resources on the web, including:

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