Using extended captions to improve learning from instructional illustrations

Abstract

Abstract This article examines two strategies for improving the effectiveness of illustrations in text. Descriptive captions repeated the contents of illustrations verbally, whereas instructive captions focused learners’attention on salient features of illustrations without descriptive text. Contrary to much of the literature on pictures and prose, these illustrations provided information that did not overlap the main body of text. Two measures of learning outcomes were used: one which assessed learning from the illustrations alone and one that assessed learning from the verbal text alone. Results favoured the caption conditions over the illustration‐only condition. However, no additive effects of the captions were observed. In addition, the illustration plus descriptive caption condition outperformed the descriptive caption condition alone and the memory for accompanying text did not suffer from the presence of the illustrations or captions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 53 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.