Pecha Kucha Style

In this JCU snapshot, we consider how an oral presentation was re-designed to make the assessment task more engaging for students and more efficient to mark for academic staff.

Oral presentation tasks are known to be text heavy, or scripted dialogues exhausting the attention span of the audience. Academics transformed an assessment item into a Pecha Kucha style presentation, and replicated this style of presentation across other subjects due to high quality work and the positive student/marker feedback. Pecha Kucha offers students the opportunity to develop a creative, visually appealing, time sensitive assessment that showcases their ability to match dialogue to image. Overall, we now have an assessment that is concise, authentic, engaging and more efficient approach for academics to mark.

A Pecha Kucha (Japanese for ‘sound of conversation/chit-chat/chatter’) is a presentation style in which 20 slides are shown for 20 seconds each (6 minutes and 40 seconds in total). The images advance automatically while the student presents to the audience. This format keeps presentations concise and fast-paced.

Valid; Fair; Authentic; Continuous; Transparent; Varied methods

The aim of this subject is for students to identify deviations from the normal health status through clinical reasoning skills relevant to advanced health assessment. Students apply and integrate knowledge of clinical symptomatology and pathophysiology to conduct comprehensive and systematic health assessments, prioritise clinical care, and create appropriate referrals to other health professionals. Clinical reflection is embedded throughout the subject and students are required to interpret clinical findings and prioritise patient management strategies.

Assessment in this subject is varied including mini clinical examination [mini-CEX], online quizzes, and reflective oral presentation.

Students are mainly practicing nurses undertaking the post-graduate Master of Nursing online.

Students who successfully complete this subject will be able to:

• Conduct advanced, culturally competent and comprehensive health assessment to differentiate between normal and abnormal findings in clinical assessment.
• Integrate knowledge of clinical symptomatology, health assessment findings, pathophysiology, and diagnostics to prioritise clinical care and appropriate referral to the broader multidisciplinary healthcare team.
• Critically reflect on clinical skills and competencies for advanced practice.
• Interpret clinical findings and prioritise patient management strategies.

Oral presentation (30%)

Students situate themselves as a clinical nurse working in a neurocognitive-sensory clinic where they are responsible for patient triage and onward referrals to relevant health professionals. As part of their role, they are required to present a patient case at an upcoming multidisciplinary team meeting.

Students are required to develop and deliver an oral presentation (recorded) using a Pecha Kucha structure that contains the following elements:

• Patient anonymity must be established throughout the presentation.
• Select a neurocognitive-sensory disease/condition and relate the pathophysiology of your selected disease/condition to the presenting symptomology.
• Describe at least ONE diagnostic test relevant to the diagnostic process of this condition.
• Recommend which multidisciplinary team/s (MDT) are the most appropriate discipline/s to provide ongoing patient management, justify this recommendation.

Students were provided with guidance and clear instructions on how to develop and record a Pecha Kucha style presentation. The Pecha Kucha presentation style used 20 images supported by narration. Each slide had 0-10 words maximum. Each slide was shown for 20 seconds resulting in a presentation lasting for 6 minutes and 40 secs.

Communication is the cornerstone of nursing and a highly valued skill that negatively and positively influences therapeutic relationships. Oral presentations are renown to be credible and authentic assessment tasks to evaluate communication skills. In other Advanced Practice stream subjects’, students were familiar with how to construct and deliver a narrated PowerPoint presentation. However, the trend of lengthy, visually unappealing, highly didactic presentations that were disengaging and time consuming for academics to mark, was becoming more prevalent. A more authentic way to assess the communication skills of nurses would be through Pecha Kucha presentations, were fluidity of speech and the creative use of imagery to convey key messages or emotion is used

The subject coordinator decided to use Pecha Kucha as the oral assessment, rather than a traditional lengthy narrated PowerPoint presentation for three main reasons.

1. The Pecha Kucha style draws on powerful images and a well-organised and structured narration which acknowledges student diversity and considers visual and aural learning styles.
2. Limiting the presentation to 6 minutes and 40 seconds, and providing a clear structure made the task less onerous for students compared narrated PowerPoint presentations or lengthy written tasks. In a team meeting situation, typically a clinician would only have a few minutes to present and discuss a case. The Pecha Kucha style is also becoming more commonly used in many contexts including conference and case presentations; therefore, this task was seen as being more authentic. Additionally, efficiencies in marking were noted by academics that enabled a faster turnaround on the assessment and feedback to students.
3. The Pecha Kucha style enabled students to experience an oral presentation style where they could be more creative and integrate additional digital skills compared to a traditional presentation.

Implementing this assessment strategy presented two challenges that may be of interest for others considering the Pecha Kucha style for oral presentation assessment tasks.

Challenge 1: Seamless acceptance of an unfamiliar oral presentation style

We provided clear, easy-to-follow guides via videos and handouts to lessen student and markers fears as they faced this unfamiliar oral presentation style. The concept, Pecha Kucha presentation, was introduced during Week 1 ‘meet and greet’ session. A further information session was delivered through a collaborate session closer to the assessment due date. We also provided a sample Pecha Kucha presentation that aligned to the assessment task.

Challenge 2: This isn’t as easy as it sounds.

The Pecha Kucha presentation comes across as an ‘easy’ assessment task. What could go wrong? Isn’t this just a collection of images that I get to do a voice over? Not really. Student learnt that they waffled on about a topic yet didn’t answer the question. They did not know the topic well enough to naturally talk it out and relied on reading a script. Six minutes and 40 seconds is not a lot of time to present information. We only asked the students to achieve four tasks, 1) select a condition, 2) link the pathophysiology to the symptomology, 3) identify diagnostic test and 4) recommend and justify the selection of multidisciplinary team referral. Retrospectively, two or three tasks would be more feasible for this timeframe, as most students felt a little rushed to deliver information that met these 4 elements.

Introducing students to ‘new ways of doing’ particularly regarding assessments initially met with some student and academic resistance. However, once students and academics realised that Pecha Kucha was more than a new presentation skill, it was a way to communicate key messages succinctly that targeted both visual and auditory senses, it was embraced. Students had structure to keep them on track but creative space to show their authentic selves.

For the lived experience watch this Pecha Kucha in action