Why do you think science books have diagrams in them?” I asked a sixth-grade student. She thought for a moment and earnestly replied, “Well, they are pretty and also show what they [texts] are talking about.” In these few words, she nicely summarized the prevalent opinion of the 30 elementary and middle grade students we interviewed about science diagrams (McTigue and Croix 2008). While diagrams make the text more visually appealing and provide an image of the text, they also do much more. Subsequently, we designed a series of lessons for students to discover the many purposes of graphics in science. A particular utility of these interdisciplinar y lessons is that they can be used with any science text featuring visual images.

We started inquiring about our students’ viewing practices of science diagrams because we noted a large mismatch between our instructional  materials and students’ reading practices: While nearly every page of the new science textbook boasted a beautiful array of complex illustrations, our students tended to ignore them. Some students admitted that they appreciated all the graphics in their new text because they could “skip over them and make the reading go much faster.” After our interview project, we concluded that if our students better understood the value of graphical
representations, they might be motivated to learn from them, or, at the very least, look at them.

We feel strongly that developing students’ visual literacy skills in science will benefit students nowand in the future for the following reasons: (1)  Visual literacy is part of being an effective communicator of science (AAAS 1993). (2) In high-stakes, state-level, middle school science tests, over half of the questions included graphics, and 80% of those graphics contained essential information for answering the questions (Yeh and McTigue 2009). (3) High school science textbooks have approximately 1.3 graphics per page and science journals have about 1.5 graphics (Bowen
and Roth 2002).

Turning to research for guidance (e.g., Levin 1981), we found other major reasons to pay heed to graphics: (1) Graphics can contain impor tant and unique information that is not in the text. (2) Graphics more easily represent certain types of information than text, such as relative location. (3) Graphics can serve as organizational tools for learning (e.g., a flowchart). Rather than simply informing our students of these findings, we created a series of lessons that would lead middle-grade students to such conclusions while aiming to create interest and understanding for visual literacy. Lesson 1 provides an introduction to important terminology and Lessons 2, 3, and 4 are each aligned with the aforementioned reasons to pay attention to science graphics. Please note that these lessons are not limited to our examples, but are readily applicable to most science content. (This article summary only, to get the full text please login or register and contact admin web)



Summer 2010.
Erin McTigue (emctigue@tamu.edu) is an assistant professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning,
and Culture at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. Amanda Croix is a former education
student at Texas A&M University and a current fifthgrade teacher in Hearne, Texas.

 

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