Key+Words+in+Instruction

Key Words in Instruction: Illustrations.Full Text Available . By: Callison, Daniel. School Library Media Activities Monthly, v16 n8 p34-36,42 Apr 2000.

AUTHOR:	Daniel Callison TITLE:	Illustrations SOURCE:	School Library Media Activities Monthly 16 no8 34-6, 42 Ap 2000 COPYRIGHT:	The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. Illustrations are techniques to help increase the portion of the audience who will understand a message. The purpose of illustration is to make clear through comparison, a more tangible example, or a less complex perspective. Illustrations are usually drawings or photographs, but also may include dramatic presentations, computer graphics, gestures, and even images in the mind. Cartoons helped to convey the depth of corruption of the Boss Tweed political machine in New York City during a time when most city citizens could not read the newspaper without the assistance of illustrations. Artists during the Middle Ages crafted murals and stained glass scenes to tell the Christian story Illustrations helped to communicate across a wider audience as well as give emphasis and drama to the narrative details available to those who had mastered reading and writing. Across our information literacy curriculum today, those who teach and model such skills know that the clich6 "a picture is worth a thousand words" is only part of the story Students consume thousands of words, orally and visually, and they need a variety of communication methods to summarize their own sharing of information and knowledge. Illustrations serve to aid the student researcher who wants to grow and mature in communication skills through the use of graphics that enhance, condense, quicken, direct, heighten, or inspire the message. Edward R. Tufte, as an opening to his classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, writes: Excellence in statistical graphics consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision, and efficiency Graphical displays should: * show the data; * induce the reviewer to think about the substance rather than about methodology, graphic design, the technology of graphic production, or something else; * avoid distorting what the data have to say; * make large data sets coherent; * encourage the eye to compare different pieces of data; * reveal the data at several levels of detail, from a broad overview to the fine structure; * serve a reasonable clear purpose: description, exploration, tabulation, or decoration; * be closely integrated with the statistical and verbal descriptions of a data set. Graphics reveal data. VISUAL LITERACY David Considine and Gail Haley have conducted many workshops and written extensively on the use of visual messages in instruction. "Visual literacy" is the ability to comprehend and create information that is carried and conveyed through imagery Exercises leading to greater student comprehension through the use of visuals include seeking patterns, matching, and categorizing images in both creative and critical ways so that students learn to analyze messages. The student grows in his or her information literacy status by learning how to read images or hidden meanings, or to elaborate on a story based on the illustrations. Students also use images to convey their own ideas through creation of cartoons, advertisements, and multimedia programming. Students may be challenged to "think visually" in situations where they are to consider images in their own mind that might represent how history would be different had certain events not happened, or to recreate a classic story based on their internal imagery of new central characters. Overlapping the skills of media literacy visual literacy may involve an understanding that illustrations are models of reality and have their limitations as well as advantages. Maps are one common example. Mark Monmonier of Syracuse University argues that not only is it easy to lie with maps, it is essential. To portray meaningful relationships for a complex, three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper or a video screen, a map must distort reality To avoid hiding critical information in a fog of detail, the map must offer a selective, incomplete view of reality Monmonier concludes there is no escape from the cartographic paradox: to present a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must tell white lies. What a fascinating area for young minds to explore as they question human devices and technologies designed to convey information in strategic ways! ILLUSTRATING THE TERM PAPE? Sue Baugh is one of the few authors of the typical guide to writing a term paper to devote a great deal of attention to the value of illustrations that can be employed by students in nearly any academic setting. Her guide pertains to undergraduate students, but her points have application across all grade levels, K-college. Baugh states that the art of using charts, tables, or other graphic material effectively is based on two principles: * Illustrations should be essential to the report and not used to conceal a lack of content. * Illustrations must support and clarify the text, not stand in place of it. When does the student need to use illustrations? Baugh offers this criteria: * The student is describing complex technical or physical processes. For example, how does cocaine affect the human body? In this case, one picture may be truly worth several thousand words. The student can include a diagram that traces the effects of this drug from the time it is ingested until the remaining amount is eliminated from the body The student can number or letter the stages and refer to them throughout the narrative. * The student has complex numerical or statistical data to convey A summary in table format may save space when there is a great deal of data to show Selected data presented in graph may serve to give special emphasis to enhance a line of persuasion. * The student is describing a particular event or subject such as a battle, city plan, or interior of a building. A map, blueprint, or other illustration can orient the reader and give a visual reference as the text continues the story or details of the report. Schematics are nearly essential in any paper dealing with computer systems, auto mechanics, or strategies that must be conveyed to a team for common understanding. * The student wants to present information to the reader and increase the chances that the reader will remember it. Illustrations can make a "lasting impression" if they provide a relevant symbolic icon, summarize a few points in a pattern matching the reader's previous experiences, or are selected for dramatic impact. In more complex situations, the illustrations need to convey clear explanatory elements that the reader can assimilate with both his knowledge base and that of the surrounding text. Baugh concludes with these guidelines for using illustrations in term papers: * Use a minimum number of graphics; be selective. * Use the smallest-sized graphic that conveys the information; illustrations should complement the text, not overwhelm it. * Make sure all graphics are designed so that words, lines, scales, and other elements are the same size. * Be sure that the terms used in the graphic are the same terms used in the text. * Cite or place the graphic in the text as close to the relevant information as possible; text and illustration are more likely to help the reader and to be used together when given on the same page. UNDERSTANDING THE VISUAL DISPLAY OF INFORMATION Virginia Rankin has provided the teacher of information literacy a collection of useful strategies and ideas in her book The Thoughtful Researcher: Teaching the Research Process to Middle School Students. In a key chapter, she addresses information found in visual formats. Her references range from charts and tables that illustrate data of business and society in USA Today and Wall Street L Journal to the summary box scores used increasingly in sports telecasting and webcasting. Students placed in situations where they are encouraged to collect visuals (photos, maps, charts, graphs, etc.) along with quotations and paraphrased descriptions will find that development of reports based on the ever-expanding Web and video hypertext formats are more exciting and rewarding. Rankin identifies these useful visual formats: * Maps: Students should analyze professionally prepared maps. Rankin states that before students design a map to display data, they must have a reason for doing it; they must have a story they wish to tell. Maps can instantly clarify regional patterns for such matters as poverty, unemployment, or crime rates. * Graphs: Line graphs may support a very specific point to be made in illustrating a conclusion. Bar graphs may be used to highlight comparisons. * Tables: May be needed to illustrate a more comprehensive story and show the spread and variance in the data. * Time Lines: Provide a chronological summary of key events. * Pictorial Representations: Rankin states that pictures supplemented with a few well-chosen words produce concrete and memorable explanations that tie together a number of related factors. These factors and their relationships can easily become lost in the long narrative, but captured for impact on one page with the use of illustrations. * Text Itself as Visual: Use boxed phrases or quotations to give emphasis to key points through the use of summary or highlight boxes. This technique is often used in professional trade magazines and is a standard tool on professional Web pages. Most valuable is Rankin's clear explanation of "teaching the visual display of information" through discussion, examples, and modeling. Rankin's message that library media specialists must provide instruction in the midst of research and not just as an introduction to research is one that all teachers of information literacy should adopt. She encourages teachers of information literacy to show tables, ask students to extract information from charts, and to discuss openly the possibilities of how to visualize the text. The mature or reflective researcher soon will understand that narrative outlining and visual storyboarding are essential companions in the design of information presentation. ILLUSTRATIONS THAT INSTRUCT Richard E. Mayer, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has based his examination of illustrations over the past two decades on one deceptively simple question, "How can one teach in ways that result in meaningful learning?" Mayer's work has concentrated on illustrations found in typical science textbooks. His research has moved past the "traditional approach" or simple tests of greater or lesser information retention when illustrations contain color or are placed in a certain area of the page. Mayer has attempted to consider the impact of illustrations through the "cognitive approach" or to what extent does an illustration link to the learner's cognitive system? His work has direct implications for those designing illustrations for Web-based tutorials and interactive computer-assisted instruction. Under the cognitive approach, illustrations are tested to determine their value to learners who bring to the illustration and text different knowledge backgrounds and abilities. According to Mayer, three major memory stores relevant to a cognitive model of learning from text and illustrations are sensory memory short-term memory, and long-term memory. The four cognitive processes most relevant to a cognitive model of learning from text and illustrations are selecting, organizing, integrating, and encoding. * Selecting: Paying attention to relevant pieces of information in the instructional materials. * Organizing: The process of building internal connections among pieces of information that are attended to. * Integrating: The process of building external connections between incoming information and knowledge already in long-term memory. * Encoding: The process of placing the knowledge constructed in long-term memory for permanent storage and retrieval. Mayer has classified illustrations into four types: * Decorative: Fill space on the page, but do not enhance the message of the text. Hence, they do not affect the reader's cognitive processing of the text. Mayer estimates about 25 percent of science text illustrations fall into this category. * Representational: Portray a single element and serve to direct the reader's attention. Mayer places about 60 percent of illustrations found in typical middle school science texts in this category. * Organizational: Depict the structural relations among two or more elements. About 5 percent of the illustrations in science texts are organizational. * Explanative: Explain how some system or process works by showing the principle-based relationships among state changes in the major elements of the system. A principle-based relation is a specific cause-and-effect connection between two events. These illustrations represent approximately 10 percent of those found in typical science textbooks. So when do illustrations work? According to Mayer, there are four conditions for effective explanative illustrations. First, the text must be explanative rather than narrative and descriptive. Second, the illustration must be explanative rather than decorative, representational, or organizational. Third, the learners must be appropriate; for example, learners who lack knowledge of mechanics would be more likely to benefit from explanative illustrations of how a mechanical system works than learners who possess mechanical knowledge. Fourth, to evaluate the effectiveness of explanative illustrations, the performance test must be appropriate for measuring conceptual retention, nonconceptual retention, and problem-solving transfer, rather than measuring only the overall amount learned. Mayer contends that explanative illustrations are generally underused or misused. They are, however, a powerful vehicle for instruction. He reports that explanative illustrations improve conceptual retention and problem-solving transfer when presented clearly, within relevant text, and are age or ability-level appropriate. These are clearly the same criteria for all forms of effective instructional oral and visual communication. ADDED MATERIAL Daniel Callison is Director of Library Science and School Media Education at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. E-mail: callison@indiana.edu URL: http://www.slis.lib.indiana.edu.ez-proxy.brooklyn.cuny.edu:2048/Faculty/callison.html He is also Editor of School Library Media Research http://www.ala.org.ez-proxy.brooklyn.cuny.edu:2048/aasl/SLMR/ FOR FURTHER READING: Baugh, L. Sue. How to Write Term Papers and Reports. Lincolnwood, IL: VGM Career Horizons and NTC Publishing, 1993. Considine, David M., and Gail E. Haley Visual Messages: Integrating Imagery into Instruction. Englewood, CO: Teacher Ideas Press, 1992. Mayer, Richard E. "Illustrations that Instruct." In Advances in Instructional Psychology, edited by Robert Glaser. Vol. 4. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993: 253-284. Monmonier, Mark. How to Lie with Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Mosenthal, Peter B., and Irwin S. Kirsch. "Understanding Documents: Understanding Graphs and Charts." Parts I and II. Reading Journal (February 1990): 371-373; (March 1990): 454-457. Rankin, Virginia. The Thoughtful Researcher: Teaching the Research Process to Middle School Students. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1999. Source: School Library Media Activities Monthly, 20000401, Vol. 16 Issue 8, p34