A Content Analysis of Visuals in Elementary School Textbooks

Abstract

Although visual complexity is increasing and graphics are essential to support readers' comprehension of disciplinary texts, visual literacy receives scant attention. Research suggests that effectively instructing students to interpret discipline-specific graphics would yield better comprehension. However, before this line of inquiry can be enacted, we must determine the characteristics of graphics in contemporary content textbooks. Therefore, this content analysis evaluated graphics within third-and fifth-grade science and social studies textbooks. We coded 3,844 graphics by type and function and compared findings between disciplines using chi-square and post hoc comparison tests. Overall, graphics were coded into 9 major types (photographs being most frequent) and 54 subtypes, indicating a diversity of graphics. When comparing disciplines, science textbooks contained more diagrams and photographs, and graphics more often functioned representationally. Social studies presented both a wider variety of graphics and more interpretationally challenging graphics. Implications for disciplinary literacy and instruction are discussed.

Illuminating learning from informative texts in secondary education: A switching replication design study

“…At each measurement occasion, students' text-learning performance was measured by means of a cued recall test regarding the study text after they had handed in their texts and scratch papers (Author, 2019). 1 The visuals included in the learning materials and study texts mainly served a decorative and representational function (Carney & Levin, 2002;Guo et al, 2018). Accordingly, the visuals served an ornamental purpose in the texts or concretely depicted the text information.…”

Do You Get the Picture? A Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Graphics on Reading Comprehension

“…Graphic type. We based our categorization of graphic types on Hegarty et al's (1996) distinctions, and aligned our terminology with that of Guo et al (2018), who provide concrete definitions of diagrams frequently used in instructional materials. We defined pictures as realistic illustrations that provided concreteness, engagement, or relevance to a text (see Figure 2 for examples).…”

“…The majority of designs featured a single graphic supporting the text. In contrast, many contemporary texts contain multiple graphics on a single page spread (Guo et al, 2018). Nine studies did not report the source of texts used and, in total, only six used materials from students' textbooks.…”

Drawings as Diagnostic Cues for Metacomprehension Judgment

“…To examine cue diagnosticity and cue utilization of drawings, we refined the graphic analysis protocol (GAP), which had been used to score graphics contained in science textbooks [41,42], to score student drawings of scientific texts. The GAPdrawing provides a more fine-grained measure of drawing quality than the overall measure of quality typically used in drawing literature [43].…”