The Center for Electronic Studying at the University of Oregon is conducting two studies designed to explore effective illustrative resources in high school biology texts for students with learning disabilities. The first focuses dynamic versus static illustrations. The second focuses on descriptive versus instructional captions.
Research Questions:
The Center for Electronic Studying at the University of Oregon is conducting two studies designed to explore effective illustrative resources in high school biology texts. There are two major research questions.
1. is there a difference in comprehension of passages from a biology textbook when students are presented with dynamic illustrations as opposed to static illustrations?
2. Is there is difference in comprehension of passages from a biology textbook when students are presented with instructional captions as opposed to descriptive captions as opposed to both types of captions combined?
Description:
DYNAMIC VERSUS STATIC ILLUSTRATIONS
The purpose of this study is to investigate the relative efficacy of two types of illustrations on the reading comprehension of secondary students with learning disabilities. Materials used in the study are text passages from a high school biology book, supported with either static illlustrations (e.g., two dimensional pictures, photos, graphs etc.) or dynamic illustrations (e.g., video, simulations, animations etc.).
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DESCRIPTIVE vs INSTRUCTIVE CAPTIONS This study examines content area learning outcomes for learning disabled students when presented a short passage of text with an accompanying illustration with a descriptive or instructive caption. A descriptive caption simply describes what is being depicted in the illustration. This is the most common type of caption. An instructive caption provides covert and overt strategies for interacting with and interpreting what is being depicted in the illustration.
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What we have learned so far:
What we do not know yet: