The Effect of Adjunct Aids on Learning From Printed Text

Abstract

This article investigates the effect on learning of adjunct aids accompanying printed text. The adjunct aids used are illustrations and questions. While there is considerable experimental literature on the effect of adjunct aids on learning from printed text and while this literature is generally affirmative, there is little experimentation either on the effect of these aids accompanying medical text or on the additive effect of these aids. This article shows that the use of adjunct illustrations can facilitate learning of specifiable information in the text but that there is a plateau effect on learning where more than one aid is used. The implications of these results are discussed for the design of instructional text.