Young children notice and make use of illustrations in picture books as they read independently as evidenced by statements such as this one from Sarah's retelling of "The Wolf's Chicken Stew": "He couldn't catch him; so he did like this (child folds arms across chest) against the tree". Scholars in the field of children's literature have long…

The literary element of character is critical to literary meaning-making, and in picturebooks images provide information important to understanding characters. This manuscript shares results of an investigation that explored the kinds of pictorial information young children use to gain insights into the characters and provide practical ways…

Reviews research examining the effects of pictorial illustrations on learning from textbooks; notes differences in purpose, approach, and methodology; identifies some shortcomings; and offers suggestions for future research. Forty references are listed. (FM)

To assist educators to develop improved instructional television presentations, research is needed to assess the instructional effects of stimuli emitted by various types of visual illustrations. (IR)

Several theories in audiovisual education hold that learning from a visual illustration is directly related to the realism of the visual aid. In order to test this theory, five treatment groups were established. All groups were pretested, taught the same unit of instruction, and posttested. Four groups saw slide sequences in which were viewed…

This study, designed to determine whether contextual organizers presented before prose passages can improve learning and retention among undergraduates with no prior knowledge of the subject, compared the effects of two types of organizers--images and their verbal equivalents--as well as organizers versus a control group. Twenty-five references…

The first experiment determined that verbal interference (shadowing) was detrimental to the subjects' memory of words and high similarity pictures; the second, designed to minimize the possibility that students would sort through the pictures, indicated that verbal interference did not decrease memory of high similarity pictures. (Author/JEG)

Reports on a study of what children actually bring to the act of reading picture books in terms of their expectations, their reading or life experience, or their understanding of artistic styles. (TB)

The effectiveness of elaborate visual cueing and reduced step size (i.e., increasing the number of visual cues) in facilitating student achievement on different instructional tasks was examined. The hypothesis proposed that instructional treatments utilizing reduced step size and elaborate visual cueing alone and in combination would be superior…

The relationship between cognitive activity, achievement, and the number of eye fixations used by a learner in viewing visuals was examined. Past research has shown a positive correlation between learning and number of eye fixations and indicated that both the stimulus materials themselves and the viewer's intelligence level may influence viewing…

The instructional effectiveness of integrating abstract and realistic visualization was studied using five types of visualization, three levels of general ability and two modes of instruction. The dependent variable was performance on a four-part criterion test representing five different types of instructional objectives, which was administered…

Reports on the effectiveness of visual illustrations used in conjunction with oral instructions. Results indicate that the reduction of realistic detail in an illustration does not necessarily reduce its instructional effectiveness and in many cases improves it. There were also significant differences in the effectiveness of different types of…