Comment on Chen and Lin ‘Does Downloading Power-Point Slides Before the Lecture Lead to Better Student Achievement?’

Chen and Lin (2008) is an interesting attempt to measure the effect of students having access to PowerPoint slides before a lecture. They argue that such access leads to better learning outcomes as measured by higher exam marks. While their empirical results shed some light on students’ use of PowerPoint slides, I argue that they have not succeeded in isolating the treatment effect and the correlations cannot be interpreted as causal.