Biology Textbook Graphics and Their Impact on Expectations of Understanding

ABSTRACT

Graphics presented alongside expository science texts can have a number of positive effects for instruction, including facilitating engagement, arousing interest, and improving understanding. However, because students harbor expectations about which contexts are likely to support better understanding, the mere presence of graphics also has the potential to lead to inaccurate judgments of understanding when those graphics do not actually lead to presumed levels of performance. Previous work has demonstrated that including graphics alongside text can alter the judgment process. The present work explores different categories of instructional graphics found in biology textbooks and tests how different graphic types, classified by their form and function, can affect expectations of understanding prior to actual reading. Experiment 1 found that realistic, depictive graphics predominated in a middle school text, whereas more abstract and explanatory graphics predominated in a college text. Experiment 2 demonstrated that different categories of graphics led to differences in expectations of how helpful graphics would be for understanding.

Funding

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under DUE grant 1535299. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We thank Marta Mielicki, Allison Jaeger, and Tim George for their comments on this project.

Notes

¹ The term “graphics” is used throughout this article as an overarching term referring to any kind of visual representation including images, illustrations, diagrams, photographs, drawings, paintings, graphs, tables, equations, formulae, taxonomic structures, molecular diagrams, timelines, flowcharts, and maps.

² These texts were not intended to represent a random sampling of all science texts or all possible biology textbook graphics. This particular set of three texts was chosen to represent the actual developmental sequence of textbooks used by a substantial portion of undergraduates at University of Illinois at Chicago who attend Chicago Public Schools and to provide an authentic sample of biology textbook graphics for a descriptive content analysis.

³ The metaphoric category (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996) was not used because graphics rarely fell into that category (as in Dimopoulos et al., 2003; Lemoni et al., 2011). In our sample, all could be coded as an analogical explanation of a process (i.e., explanative graphics).

⁴ Understanding and interest ratings were performed by separate groups because pilot testing showed sizable contamination (order effects) across the two types of judgments when performed within subject.

⁵ Three gave no response.

Additional information

Funding

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under DUE grant 1535299. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We thank Marta Mielicki, Allison Jaeger, and Tim George for their comments on this project.