The Unrealized Potential of Visuals

Photographs, drawings, and videos all have the ability to help learners understand course content better - when used appropriately. Part of our aim with the Media Development Project is to help instructors understand how to use visuals effectively. This post captures some key elements from chapter one in the research-based book Graphics for Learning by Ruth Colvin Clark and Chopeta Lyons (2004).

The Unrealized Potential of Visuals

Have you designed a handout for your class and at the last minute added some clip art in the corner to make it look nicer? Clark and Lyons note that visuals are often an afterthought added to instructional material used to add visual interest. Unfortunately, this means that the true learning power of the visual is not used - and, worse, some visuals can actually interfere with learning.

Three Factors of Effective Visuals

1) Function

Surface features - the features that stand out when looking at a visual, such as whether it is a photo or an illustration, a video or an animation. Research found that surface features do not impact the effectiveness of learning; basically, people can learn from all types of visuals depending on the other factors.

Communication function - what are you trying to communicate with the visual? The authors present seven different communication categories (p 15).

• decorative - used to make something look good or add humour
• representational - used to show something as it really is (as with a photograph)
• mnemonic - used to provide retrieval cues for factual information
• organizational - used to show qualitative relationships
• relational - used to show quantitative relationships
• transformational - used to show changes in objects over space or time
• interpretive - used to illustrate a theory, principle, or cause-and-effect relationships

Psychological function - how visuals can support the learning process. This can be done in six separate ways (p 16).

• support attention - by drawing attention to important elements and minimizing divided attention
• activate or build prior knowledge - by engaging existing mental models or providing an overview to support learning of new information
• minimize cognitive load - by minimizing unnecessary mental work and working memory load
• build mental models - by helping construct new long-term memories
• support transfer of learning - by promoting deeper understanding and realistically showing key features
• support motivation - by making material interesting but not depressing learning

2) Instructional Goals and Lesson Content

Not all visuals match all instructional goals. Certain visuals will provide memory support, some visuals will assist in creating relationships between pieces of information in the lesson and thus help learners build mental models. These concepts are expanded on in a later chapter in the book.

3) Learner Differences

Not all learners will glean the same information from the same visual. Both prior knowledge of a subject and one’s spatial abilities influence how helpful a visual may be to a specific learner. These concepts are expanded on in a later chapter in the book.

Choosing Instructional Graphics

The authors provide three guidelines for choosing effective graphics.

1. Graphic effectiveness depends on graphic functionality - focus on the communicative and psychological functions rather than the surface features
2. Guidelines for graphics should be based on research evidence - their guidelines are based off of research, most of which was done with college-age people
3. Context will influence use of visuals - graphic selection needs to be based on the entire instructional landscape (ie: delivery mode, budgets, etc.). This concept is expanded on in a later chapter in the book.

Want more details? This article talks about much of the same content as this chapter of the book.