An Eye-Tracking Study of Learning From Science Text With Concrete and Abstract Illustrations

Abstract

This study investigated the online process of reading and the offline learning from an illustrated science text. The authors examined the effects of using a concrete or abstract picture to illustrate a text and adopted eye-tracking methodology to trace text and picture processing. They randomly assigned 59 eleventh-grade students to 3 reading conditions: (a) text only; (b) text with a concrete illustration; and (c) text with an abstract illustration in a pretest, immediate, and delayed posttest design. Results showed that the text illustrated by either the concrete or the abstract picture led to better learning than did the text alone. Eye-fixation data revealed that the abstract illustration promoted more efficient processing of the text. Analyses of the gaze shifts between the 2 types of external representation indicated that the readers of the text with the abstract illustration made a greater effort to integrate verbal and pictorial information. Furthermore, relations between online and offline measures emerged.

Keywords:

• eye movements
• instructional pictures
• learning from text
• text comprehension
• text processing

Acknowledgments

The study is part of an ongoing research project on learning difficulties in the science domain (STPD08HANE_001) funded by a grant to the first author from the University of Padova, Italy, under the founding program for “Strategic Projects.”

The authors are grateful to all of the students involved in the study, their parents, and teachers, and the school principal.

Notes

1. For reasons of relevance, Tables 4 and 5 report only the eye-tracking indices that significantly correlated with posttest scores in at least one of the two reading conditions of illustrated text.