Methods of Encoding - Pairing Visuals

A popular applause line at education conferences is "Nothing has changed in education for 200 years!"  It gets everybody fired up for the "new" thing that the speaker wants to promote, but it simply is not true.  I taught for 25 years and was, of course, a student for 17 years before that.  And just in that relatively short time, education has changed dramatically.  The fact that we sit in rows at desks notwithstanding, my grandparents wouldn't recognize most of what happens in classrooms today.  Have you ever picked up a textbook from a hundred years ago?  It is only a few millimeters thick, has tiny font, no pictures, and little spacing - printing was way too expensive to waste precious space.

Tech has brought about a million flashy changes.  Kids can make videos of their own, but the most profoundly effective change was probably the simplest - pairing visual images with explanations.

I know you were expecting something more fun, and I'm certainly not going to be able to sell this to people at conferences.

But it really is this simple.  

Is the impact because we are addressing the learning styles of visual learners?  

No.  That isn't a thing.  You aren't a visual learner.  Stop saying it.  Your child is not a visual learner.  Just stop.  Stop it now.

The reason pairing visuals with explanations is so powerful for encoding information is because we ALL essentially have two pathways in the brain for processing information. Verbal and images.  

Verbal information can be spoken or written - it doesn't matter because they are both words, and words are processed by the verbal pathway.  Images are, of course, pictures. Or animated video. Or even pictures we imagine in our minds.  When these two processing centers are used in conjunction, they compliment each other, and encoding is more powerful.  It's called Dual Coding, and it helps EVERY student (and is, I believe, one of the reasons the learning styles myth just won't die - people don't understand the difference).

But just as I said last week that not all explanations are created equal, the same is true of how we pair our images and explanations.  I'm not talking about clip art, here. I fell for this for a while, so I want to be clear that some images serve as nothing more than a distraction.  If I am teaching physics students to solve kinematics problems (the relationship between acceleration, distance, and time) and include a picture of a race car just for the sake of having a picture, that is NOT dual coding.  If I put in a gif of a race car going past over and over again because I think kids like gifs, that is NOT dual coding.  Those images are impeding learning, not enhancing it.

An image that helps your explanation is one in which the image provides detail, context, or anchors that words alone cannot.  A photograph of a flower in a science book is unlikely to help (unless it is just to show types of a certain varietal), but a labeled diagram of a flower with lines pointing to the structures being named can enhance a paragraph in which those structures are explained.  

The less eye movement required to take in the information, the better.  An image with direct labels is better than one with letters corresponding to words elsewhere on the page.  In very detailed pictures (like anatomical drawings), this may not be possible, but put it as close to the image as possible.  Ideally, the words and image can be processed simultaneously without splitting your attention.

What's nice about understanding the difference between the truth of dual coding and the myth of learning styles is that you don't have to pressure yourself into making three different lesson plans for the same subject.  You can design one high quality lesson with modalities that fit the content, and ALL students will benefit.