Creating visual explanations improves learning

Abstract

Many topics in science are notoriously difficult for students to learn. Mechanisms and processes outside student experience present particular challenges. While instruction typically involves visualizations, students usually explain in words. Because visual explanations can show parts and processes of complex systems directly, creating them should have benefits beyond creating verbal explanations. We compared learning from creating visual or verbal explanations for two STEM domains, a mechanical system (bicycle pump) and a chemical system (bonding). Both kinds of explanations were analyzed for content and learning assess by a post-test. For the mechanical system, creating a visual explanation increased understanding particularly for participants of low spatial ability. For the chemical system, creating both visual and verbal explanations improved learning without new teaching. Creating a visual explanation was superior and benefitted participants of both high and low spatial ability. Visual explanations often included crucial yet invisible features. The greater effectiveness of visual explanations appears attributable to the checks they provide for completeness and coherence as well as to their roles as platforms for inference. The benefits should generalize to other domains like the social sciences, history, and archeology where important information can be visualized. Together, the findings provide support for the use of learner-generated visual explanations as a powerful learning tool.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s41235-016-0031-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Vark Questionnaire Online Platform as a Spearhead for the Effectiveness of Styles and Methods of Teaching Teachers

“…The classical teaching style is judged to fit by the authors implicit in the class that majority have a visual learning style due to the classical teaching style referring to the material giving by the teacher in various ways, such as through class lectures, Exposure to images or the use of props described by the teacher, as well as the technological teaching style that refers to the use of the learning media as a refinement of the classical teaching style. Compilers can argue in such a way, for capturing information if a student has a visual learning style will be easier when the teacher explains with the methods of lectures and the learning media [21].…”

Drawing Analogies to Deepen Learning

“…We must make decisions about how to represent and combine elements with no external visual clues. Bobek & Tversky () have demonstrated the value of this, showing deeper and longer retention of learning after ‘drawn explanations’ were made, than from verbal explanations alone. Crucially, they showed that this benefit occurs regardless of drawing ‘ability’.…”

Emojis in public health and how they might be used for hand hygiene and infection prevention and control

“…Education entertainment provided by social media is a promising method to promote individual behavior change such as hand hygiene [43], and emojis are helpful tools to add topics and ideas by facilitating a more natural communication [6]. According to the literature, visual stimuli have been found effective to use in lectures and written texts in order to improve hand hygiene behavior and it has also been suggested that animated visual elements may have a better and more direct effect compared with static pictures [44][45][46]. Likewise, emotional events are memorized more precisely and for a longer duration compared with neutral events, making them beneficial aspects to consider in education and memory [47].…”