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Pictures and Visuals

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Study Skills & Tools All Ages Strategy

Skills

Verbal Reasoning Verbal Memory Processing Speed

Pictures and Visuals

If your student's visual memory or abstract reasoning is stronger than their verbal skills

Use It In Your Instructional Practice

  1. Objective: Incorporate pictures or visual imagery alongside text to strengthen students' understanding and retention.
  2. Offer visual cues to make language-based material more vivid and concrete for students. When presenting information, find ways to add a visual component, whether by showing pictures in a book or on screen, providing a related map, drawing sketches or diagrams on the board, or encouraging students to create a vivid picture in their heads.
  3. When the subject matter lends itself to it, use graphs and tables in addition to pictures and maps. Exposing students to numerical information improves analytical ability, demonstrates that visuals come in a variety of forms, and increases graphic literacy.
  4. Providing visual imagery and pictures is particularly important when providing Context in Advance of Non-Fiction. When students are unfamiliar with content, using visuals and words together significantly increases their preparation to learn a subject and meets the needs of both visual and verbal learners.

Teach The Student Boost

  1. Explain Why: When you add a visual cue like a picture or drawing to what you are studying, it helps you see the information to more easily understand and remember it.
  2. Model how to create visuals and imagery through the use of graphic organizers or encourage students to Draw Pictures and Create Flashcards with Pictures to study.
  3. Teach students to use pictures and visualize content in order to better understand and retain key information. Asking students to Draw pictures or diagrams, Create Flashcards with Pictures, or use Elaboration helps them to better understand and retain information.

Understand Why It Is Important

Visual cues help students make concrete connections and remember concepts more actively. The idea of using visuals in addition to verbal cues is known as dual-coding or multi-modal reinforcement. Engaging multiple senses is one of the most effective strategies for both understanding and retention.

This strategy is beneficial for all students, but might be particularly helpful for students with stronger visual skills.