Figure 1: Aussie Shepherds in their element!

Imagine I was speaking to a group of students, or reading them a PowerPoint slide with nothing but text on it that said something like this:

“Picture a scene in a rural environment. It is an autumn day, and although the sky is full of grey clouds, it looks like the sun is trying to break through. In the background, there are colorful deciduous trees which border a field. In the field, there are two Australian Shepherds: one Black Tri Aussie Shepherd, and one Blue Merle Aussie Shepherd. There is a small herd of sheep behind them; the Aussies are truly in their element!”

Without a visual, it could possibly be difficult for some students to “picture” what is going on in the above description. What if they don’t know what an Australian Shepherd is? What if they don’t know what a deciduous tree is? There are some terms in the description which would require some prior knowledge (type of tree, breed of dog, etc.) for the students to fully understand it. An image to describe the scene would be beneficial to support the students that may not have the prior/specific knowledge! Not only would a visual aid be able to help students better understand the description, it may help them form definitions/descriptions for the terms they don’t know. In other words, the visual alongside the text increases the students learning/understanding of the description. This theory ties into the Multimedia Learning Hypothesis that a combination of text and images promotes deeper learning of a concept.

In class today, we discussed this concept of using text and images to better support students’ learning. For the most part, I agree with the statement. When I am new to a topic, I appreciate a mixture of visuals and text to increase my learning. For example, in a unit which introduces new vocabulary in a second language course, I benefit from visuals to help me define words without needing to translate them to English. I always find my understanding of a second language is best when I am able to understand the text visually in my mind rather than needing to first translate it in my mind in order to achieve a visual understanding of the text. However, once I am more familiar with something, or competent in a certain subject area, I personally don’t feel the need to have images to support my understanding of a written text because my deeper comprehension of a certain concept implies that I can visualize its meaning/significance in my mind. Hence, in my experience, I agree with the Multimedia Learning Hypothesis for the early stages of learning, but I don’t think it is absolutely necessary to represent content in a multimodal manner once I’ve achieved a certain level of understanding on a specific topic.

The image in Figure 1 represents the scene I described with the Australian Shepherds and sheep in the field lined by deciduous trees. I created this image using other images with PowerPoint. I never knew that PowerPoint was such a useful resource – it was so simple to create this image, and I am excited that I learned about the various uses of PowerPoint so that I can easily make my future lessons/presentations more multimodal!