Science visual literacy: Learners’ perceptions and knowledge of diagrams

McTigue, Erin M., & Flowers, Amanda C. (2011). Science visual literacy: Learners’ perceptions and knowledge of diagrams. The Reading Teacher, 64(8), 578-589.

Diagrams and other visuals in informational text can help readers comprehend such texts, but they can also impede comprehension. Much depends upon the quality of the visuals themselves, as well as upon the strategies a reader has to make sense of those visuals. The authors of this article had 30 students in Grades 2-8 sort diagrams according to the students’ perceptions of their difficulty, attractiveness, and utility. They also interviewed all 30 students using an interview protocol (provided in Fig. 3 on p. 586) and then also did in-depth “think-aloud” type interviews with six focus students. The authors found that students did not have many strategies for reading diagrams, and that their understandings of what those diagrams told them were often superficial and even downright inaccurate. The authors cite research that indicates that we do not do much teaching about visual text or strategies to use such text in elementary schools. Teachers tend to just point to such texts without doing any kind of real teaching about them (the authors recommend modeling a “think-aloud” approach), and students tend to look at the rest of the text rather than the visuals. With visual texts so prevalent in informational text (especially in science) and with high-stakes tests often including items requiring reading visuals like diagrams, and with the current increased emphasis on using informational text in the elementary grades, the messages found in this article may be of critical importance.

As I pondered the problems presented here, I tried to make some connections. At first the article puzzled me because I had sort of thought that visuals would always assist in comprehension. After all, they tend to be multimodal (usually combining print and visual texts, but these days also other modalities are possible), and comprehending visually is supposed to be easier, right? After all, isn’t “a picture worth a thousand words”? After reading this article, I realize that my conceptions of visual texts were probably not accurate. Sometimes visual texts can be confusing and difficult to make sense of. I tried to think about maps. Is a map always easier to read than directions given entirely in words? Not necessarily. Some maps are clearer than others, and some people learn better with words than with pictures, and sometimes visual input can be just too much. Ironically, and probably unintentionally by the authors, the point about overwhelming visuals was brought home for me by some of the visuals used in this very article! I found the authors’ multiple bar graphs in Figure 2 (p. 583) quite challenging to make sense of. Three graphs are provided, one for each of three factors being measured from the student interviews (Difficulty of diagrams, Attractiveness of diagrams, and Utility of diagrams). The authors look at how student perceptions of some of these factors interact with one another, but the interactions are not shown here, only the three separate factors. The reader has to scan up and down across the graphs to see the interactions. Like the children in previous research cited in this article, I gave up and just skipped to the running text to read what the authors told me about what the graphs said. I recognized that strategy (we could call it “just skip it and go to the authors’ summary”) as one that I have used before with highly technical research articles with complex data tables. That strategy can get me through the article, but could lead to less developed comprehension of what I am reading. There is even a danger in that strategy, because when I read an author’s summary I am relying on the author’s interpretation, rather than looking more directly at the data myself and forming my own interpretations.

There’s much more to be learned here, and I’d like to explore that. The authors recommend assessing how one’s own students perceive visual texts, and the interview protocol they provide in Figure 3 would be a relatively easy way for elementary school teachers to do that. They also recommend having students make diagrams as a way of learning more about them. Making diagrams seems to be more difficult even than reading them, but the two processes should reinforce one another. I saw exactly what the authors recommend being done with a first grade group who were studying insects, and I do think that making the diagrams led to more awareness and more strategic use of diagrams for those students. I see my own students struggling with representing data visually, which is required in a major assignment in one of my college teacher education courses. I may spend more time discussing the challenges involved when next we do that assignment. Not only might that help my own students, but it will help them see ways to help their own future students better create and understand visual texts.