1. PowerPoint
Disciplinary
Differences
Nathan Garrett, PhD
Assistant Professor of IT
Assistant Dean, School of Business, Woodbury Univ.

2. Science
Citation
Analysis

4. Wikipedia in 2010
3,404,866 English articles
20% of total articles

6. Classifying Disciplines
Humanities: Biglan Categories
Art and Art History, History, Literature,
Hard/Soft

Music and Music Education, Philosophy, 
Religious Studies
 Pure/Applied
Social Sciences:
 Anthropology, Economics, Political  Life/Non-Life
Science, Psychology, Sociology
Natural Sciences:
 Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science,
Mathematics, Physics

8. PowerPoint Best Practices
 Impacts
 Learning? No.
 Clarity, organization, likability
 Use
 Short phrases and Long titles
 No fluff
 Lots of pictures (relevance?)
 Best for non-math disciplines?

9. Std. Dev.
Area Life/Non-life Discipline Book Count Slide Count Avg. Slides per Book Slides per
Book
Life Anthropology 27 824 30.5 29.4
Life Political Science 58 1,518 26.2 18.6
Life Psychology 85 1,381 16.2 7.7
Humanities/Social Life Sociology 54 950 17.6 10.2
Sciences Non-Life Communication 127 2,361 18.6 14.0
Non-Life English 94 1,292 13.7 8.0
Pure & Soft Non-Life History 63 893 14.2 8.2
Non-Life Interdisciplinary 9 122 13.6 2.7
Non-Life Philosophy 19 466 24.5 14.7
Non-Life Theatre 5 125 25.0 15.5
Natural Sciences & Math Life Biology 5 119 23.8 6.6
Non-Life Chemistry 9 170 18.9 7.3
Non-Life Math 122 5,609 46.0 36.2
Pure & Hard Non-Life Statistics 28 471 16.8 5.3
Life Criminal Justice 62 1,044 16.8 6.8
Life Education 53 737 13.9 5.3
Life Emergency 15 223 14.9 12.8
Life Fashion Design 14 209 14.9 5.1
Life Management 80 1,430 17.9 8.1
Social Professions Life Marketing 36 615 17.1 6.4
Life Religion 7 144 20.6 11.8
Applied & Soft Life Social Work / Therapy 41 576 14.0 2.7
Non-Life Accounting/Finance 59 1,109 18.8 9.3
Non-Life Culinary 73 1,402 19.2 11.2
Non-Life Economics 57 1,616 28.4 28.1
Non-Life Law 35 678 19.4 12.0
Science Profession Life Health 63 1,323 21.0 17.3
Non-Life Computer Science 121 2,007 16.6 10.8
Non-Life Decision Science 16 438 27.4 16.6

10. Variable creation
 Flesch/Kincaid formula
 Word Count

11. Variable creation
1. Small
2. Medium
3. Large
4. Xlarge
5. Count
6. Scale

13. Biglan categories & slides
 Regression with step-wise selection
 4 separate equations

14. What about course evaluations?
 Not correlated with:
 Student grades, professor gender, professor rank
 Are weakly related to:
 Majors v. GE courses
 Upper v. lower division
 Smaller v. larger courses
 Significantly related to:
 Humanities  Social Sciences  Sciences
 IDEA Course Evaluations

17. Final conclusions
 Biglan Significance?
 Hard disciplines: simple statements & lots of
little images
 Life
disciplines: complex statements and large
images
 PowerPoint & Course Evaluations
 Simple & Large Images
 Differences between discipline type