Adding Captivating Visuals To Textbooks Makes It Difficult for Children To Learn

A new study has found that using captivating visuals in textbook lessons sometimes can prove distracting to children, reports Science Daily.

School textbooks are known to add captivating visuals to their content in order to make them look attractive and grab a student's attention. But a new study has found that sometimes these captivating visuals make it difficult for a student to concentrate on the content and learn the lesson.

The study was conducted on a group of children aged between 6 and 8 years. Researchers found that these children learn to read a bar graph better when it is simple and of a single color. Children that were shown multicolored bar graphs or those with designs like flowers and bears usually took a longer time to learn to read the graph as they began counting the flowers and bears instead of paying attention to the height of the bars.

"Graphs with pictures may be more visually appealing and engaging to children than those without pictures. However, engagement in the task does not guarantee that children are focusing their attention on the information and procedures they need to learn. Instead, they may be focusing on superficial features," said Jennifer Kaminski, co-author of the study and research scientist in psychology at The Ohio State University.

Authors of the study asked 16 elementary school teachers if they would use these visually appealing graphs in their study material, all of them said yes because according to them, they thought that these visually appealing graphs would be more effective in teaching smaller children.

However, this is not true and doesn't apply to only Math and graphs but to other educational material as well.

"When designing instructional material, we need to consider children's developing ability to focus their attention and make sure that the material helps them focus on the right things," Kaminski said. "Any unnecessary visual information may distract children from the very procedures we want them to learn."

122 kindergarten students took part in the study. The first part of the study included showing these children graphs on a computer and training them on how to read these graphs accurately. The graphs involved data on how many shoes were in the lost and found section each week for five weeks. Half the children were shown graphs that had bars of a single color while the other half were shown graphs with shoes as the bars. After the training, the children were tested on three graphs that were either in solid colors and had flowers. However, the flowers were not equal to the correct -value for the bar. In other words, the bar value could equal 14 flowers, but only seven flowers were pictured.

It was discovered that most children who were trained with pictures instead of a solid color got the readings wrong as they counted the number of flowers in the graph and not the height of the graph.

The study was funded in part from grants by the Federal Institute of Educational Sciences and the National Science Foundation.