Studying Visual Displays: How to Instructionally Support Learning

Abstract

Visual displays are very frequently used in learning materials. Although visual displays have great potential to foster learning, they also pose substantial demands on learners so that the actual learning outcomes are often disappointing. In this article, we pursue three main goals. First, we identify the main difficulties that learners have when learning from visual displays. Knowledge about these difficulties is an important basis for selecting appropriate support procedures. Second, we present an overview of empirically tested support procedures and the evidence about their effectiveness. We distinguish between material-oriented interventions and learner-oriented interventions. Material-oriented interventions are, for example, reducing the visual displays’ complexity, cueing/signaling, or physically integrating text and pictures. Learner-oriented interventions refer to the training of learning prerequisites, pre-training, and prompting. Third, we outline fruitful lines of further research with a specific focus on (a) the tentative explanations we provide on the basis of the best available evidence, (b) promising but not yet fully approved support procedures, and (c) important issues that have largely not been researched up to now.