Goal
Modern medical education continues to rely on traditional lectures as a teaching modality in formal courses and in academic traditions such as grand rounds, conference sessions and job talks. Yet medical educators receive little explicit training on how to design presentations to best facilitate the comprehension and retention of information. Our goal was to develop an instrument that is grounded in evidence from education and cognitive psychology about how adults learn. We wanted the instrument to be useful for guiding presentation design by highlighting evidence-based practices for color scheme, use of text and visual elements, content organization, etc. We also wanted the tool to be useful in the evaluation of existing presentation slide decks as faculty require direct feedback to improve their teaching.

Methods
The theories of cognitive load, multi-media learning, assertion-evidence, explicit instruction and cognitive apprenticeship all have practical applications to the organization and visual appearance of academic presentations. Using these theories as a guide, we developed the Presentation Development & Evaluation Tool. Between January and March 2025 we engaged in three rounds of slide review on six presentation slide decks. After each round, the project team met to compare ratings and refine the tool.

Results
The Presentation Development & Evaluation Tool is currently being used as part of UMass Chan Medical School's Summer Intensive for Presentation Skills faculty development program. It is being used as a development tool for participant projects, and as an evaluation tool as part of the planned program evaluation which will assess participant slide decks pre- and post-program.

Conclusions
The Presentation Development & Evaluation Tool has the potential to increase the effectiveness of lecture-based teaching for our learners and help raise the standards to which we hold academic presentations in biomedical education.