Pictures have been important for communication for thousands of years. It is easy for students to lose interest in learning materials with complicated content. Visuals may have many functions, such as attract, gain, get, hold, and maintain attention of a learning material. In contrast to pictures used for advertising, decoration, and entertainment, the main purposes for use of visuals in education are cognitive and pedagogical. Our use of pictures must always be adapted to the intended audiences, and to the available technology. Teachers, and students, need to pay attention to visuals in learning materials. Most students do not attend to the visuals unless they actually are instructed to do so. At this point, how pictures are included in the learning process is decisive on the expected impact. As an effective visualization type, infographics enable conveying complex information in a big picture by combining text and visuals. Beyond instructor-provided infographics, infographic creation enables focusing on a subject, researching in-depth and visualizing the constructed knowledge.
TopImage Functions In Learning
It is easy for students to lose interest in all kinds of learning materials with complicated content. For several centuries, educators have used images and pictures in their work. With the help of good images and pictures, it is possible to illustrate concepts and phenomena that are complicated and difficult to explain with words alone. At present, online and blended learning is occurring around the globe in meaningful ways to address specific needs of K-12 students (Barbour, 2018).
Visuals may have different intended functions, and also different real functions. Visual messages stimulate us both emotionally and intellectually. Images and pictures make us feel as well as think. Many researchers in information design, instructional message design, visual communication, and visual literacy have suggested various functions, objectives, purposes and roles for the use of images and pictures. Pettersson (2020, p. 10–21) found that authors of chapters in books, and research articles expressed more than 250 opinions about image functions. These researchers used more than one hundred different explanatory verbs to express their opinions. Most of these opinions concern attention, such as attract, gain, get, hold, and maintain attention to a text.
It is easy for students to lose interest in their learning materials. Pictures often have important social functions at home, at schools, in organizations, and in society. In addition to purely informative and realistic visuals, there are also visuals that can be described as “metaphoric visuals.” These visuals depict and exemplify linguistic metaphors. Visuals of this kind are not symbolic in any “art sense,” or in any “semiotic sense.” Metaphoric pictures are abstract, and also intellectually demanding. Houts et al. (2006) found that individuals with low literacy were helped when pictures accompanied the text.
In contrast to pictures used for advertising, decoration, entertainment, and marketing the main purposes for use of visuals in education can be labelled “cognitive” and/or “pedagogical” (Pettersson, 2020, p. 32–38). In the school environment the six most common purposes to use images and pictures are to: show, explain, visualize, illustrate, clarify, and inform.
There are different “fashions” in teaching practices. These fashions differ from culture to culture, and they sometimes change over time. Fashion in the use of different educational media is partly related to the technology that actually is available to teachers at a specific time. In the USA Guo, Wright, and McTigue (2018) made a content analysis of all the visuals they could find in seven contemporary third- and fifth-grade science and social studies textbooks. They coded a total of 3,844 visuals into the following nine major visual types:
- 1.
Photographs (62.36%) includes simple photographs, and cluster photographs.
- 2.
General images (16.29%) includes Bird’s-eye views, cartoon illustrations, cartoon/thought-bubble text boxes, characters (foreign language), computer-enhanced photographs, fine art visuals, image clusters, logos, magnified images, photographs of illustrations, radar images, realistic illustrations, scientific models, screenshot images, stop motion images, and X-ray images.
- 3.
Maps (5.28%) includes cartoon maps, cluster maps, context maps, flow maps, grid map, landmark maps, region maps, simple maps, street maps, and topographic map.
- 4.
Diagrams (4.5%) includes bird’s-eye view diagrams, cross-section diagrams, cutaway diagram, cutaway cluster diagrams, illustrated equation diagrams, scale diagrams, scale conventional units, and simple diagrams.
- 5.
Flow diagrams (4.5%) includes cyclical sequences, flow diagram with forked sequences, linear sequence diagrams, tree diagrams, and web diagrams.
- 6.
Tables (3.88%) includes column tables, pictorial tables, row and column tables, and row tables.
- 7.
Graphs (1.85%) includes bar graphs, line graphs, pie charts, pyramid charts, and Venn diagrams.
- 8.
Time lines (.75%) includes multiple time lines, and simple time lines.
- 9.
Comic strips (.60%) are produced to provide instructions, produced to provide entertainment or examples.