Add Pizazz to That Research Paper with Prezi!
Like many learners around the world, students in Karen Hopkins’s language arts classroom at Craver Middle School in rural
Colorado City, Colorado, USA, are
required to write a research paper. It’s
your standard-fare research project—
all students must create a works-cited
page and include references to sources
within the text. Recently, however, we
added a new element to the assignment that not only improved student
engagement and parental involvement,
but also facilitated higher-order thinking and enhanced students’ knowledge
of the content.
By requiring students to supplement
their research papers with a presentation using the online digital-authoring
tool Prezi, students discovered a fun
new way to share their reports with
their peers and parents. The tool also
helped students focus their thesis statements and supporting evidence, and it
allowed Hopkins to integrate digital age
tools into her language arts classroom.
Creating Prezis
First, students made an outline and
wrote their research papers. Next,
they created their Prezis—based on
the same outlines as their research papers—using images, video, and text.
Prezi is a virtual whiteboard that
transforms presentations from monologues into conversations, enabling
viewers to see, understand, and remember ideas. It mixes images and
words to create a visual story with
flow and narrative.
Prezi is simple and intuitive for most
students, and any questions students
had or glitches they encountered with
the program were quickly handled by
other students who were eager to help
their peers.
When students supplemented their research papers with a presentation using
the online digital-authoring tool Prezi, they discovered a fun new way
to share their reports with their peers and parents.
We wanted to find out the impact
of the Prezis on the students’ content
knowledge, so we assessed students
after they completed their research pa-
pers but before they worked on their
Prezis. We compared those results
with the results of a post-Prezi assess-
ment. Overall, students’ comprehen-
sion of their topics, based on a thesis
statement, supporting evidence, and
conclusion, increased by 30%. More
than 50% of the students demonstrat-
ed growth in their knowledge of their
topic after completing their Prezis.
Of the students who demonstrated
growth, the average amount of growth
after developing the Prezi was more
than 65%.
