Pictures & Visuals
Overview
Visuals help students recognize relationships within words and sentences to develop reading skills. Using visual aids, such as pictures, diagrams, and charts, allows for additional processing time and supports learners by breaking down a skill into more manageable parts.
Example: Use This Strategy in the Classroom
Hear how this teacher uses picture clues to teach reading. By using picture books with strong illustrations, she supports Vocabulary development, leading to deeper comprehension, and retrieval of concepts from Short-term Memory.
Design It into Your Product
Videos are chosen as examples of strategies in action. These choices are not endorsements of the products or evidence of use of research to develop the feature.
Watch how developers of InferCabulary created an app that uses visuals to teach Vocabulary. By presenting five related images, learners practice inferring the meaning of unfamiliar Vocabulary words. Seeing images in addition to text further reinforces the definitions of the words, leading to greater retention in Long-term Memory.
Additional Resources
Additional examples, research, and professional development. These resources are possible representations of this strategy, not endorsements.
Factors Supported by this Strategy
More Visual Learning Tools Strategies
Advance graphic organizers link prior knowledge to upcoming learning to help students anticipate and understand the structure of new information.
Visualizing how ideas fit together helps students construct meaning and strengthen recall.
Providing visuals to introduce, support, or review instruction activates more cognitive processes to support learning.
Videos developed with discussion guides can teach students about SEL skills.
