Diagrams and Images in Teaching Are Not Always Helpful

Using a visual to help teach is common practice within environmental education, but it is unclear whether these aid in the learning process. Developmentally, young children cannot grasp abstract concepts. As a result, complex ideas and processes that are not easily visible are concepts that can be difficult to understand. In teaching and learning environments, pictures, images, and models are often used to accompany and explain the adjoining text. Many teachers assume these pictures help to advance the learning and understanding of young students, yet little research exists to support this assumption. This study aims to pinpoint instances in which imagery is successful or unsuccessful at getting children to come to appropriate interpretations of an environmental text and concept.

The researchers selected a booklet about composting, “Refuse becomes Soil,” because its illustrations play a crucial role in telling the story. The booklet was short, containing fewer than 35 simple words with large, colorful illustrations. Selected from schools in close proximity to the researchers' institution, 16 Swedish children aged 7-9 were randomly chosen to work in pairs to read the booklet aloud. Following this activity, the researcher asked the children questions. Many questions focused on whether the children had looked at the pictures (if they answered no, they were asked to go through the booklet again), and around the content of the book, paying special attention to the main intellectual leap of refuse becoming soil. This crucial piece of understanding was mainly portrayed in the illustrations in the text. The children were then asked to draw pictures of what happened in the compost bin. Researchers paid special attention to the conversation between the children who were deciding what should be drawn in their compost bin. Each session involved the children reading the booklet, conversing, and creating their drawing. The session was videotaped and transcribed, then analyzed in conjunction with the picture created during each session. In their analysis, the researchers focused on how the children spoke about the images in the booklet, and also how and why the children put different details into their own illustrations. Additionally, the booklet itself was discussed at great length among the researchers, focusing on which images directly illustrated the text and which served more interpretational purposes.

The results call into question the efficacy of images included with text. Students' understanding of the booklet fell into one of two camps, depending on whether the children could recognize the relationship between the pictures and text. In most of the sessions, the children did not display any understanding of the relationship between the images and text at all. Even after looking closely at the pictures, children read the text and then pointed out almost exactly quoting the text, the specific details in the complementary picture, indicating a regurgitation of information, instead of true understanding. Their own illustrations tended to highlight the objects present in a scene, rather than the process that the scene depicted, which showed an understanding of the images in a purely representational sense.

The researchers found very few instances in which participants successfully recognized and integrated the image to create a better understanding of the text. While eventually the children from 5 out of the 8 study groups drew correct conclusions about the origins of soil in composting and the role of fauna in that process, the children in the other 3 groups did not. In the successful cases, the children began with a representational understanding of the picture, and eventually were able to come to conclusions about the decomposition process. These connections were exemplified by the children focusing on the actions and role of the animals in the compost bin to create soil, rather than simply the presence of the animals in the compost bin.

One of the limitations was that the students who did not even look at the pictures initially may have been trying to impress the researchers with their reading skills, that they merely thought the study to be a reading exercise, or simply that they were bored by the task. The researchers state that the body language of the students seemed to belie these conclusions, especially given that the task was a relatively typical activity administered in a school setting. An additional limitation is that it is unclear whether some of the students came in with prior knowledge about the processes outlined in the booklet that could have tainted the study. This was a small study in a specific educational context, and the results may be different with different or older students in another location.

The authors of this study recommend that lessons and texts avoid images that are decorative, as those distract and detract from young students' learning. Additionally, the authors say that all images, especially those merely meant for decoration, are subject to unexpected interpretations that may in fact hinder a student's learning process. While this study found there is reason to believe that images do not always help the learning process, more research is needed to better understand whether and how images are effective.