Chapter 12: Theory, Practice, and Challenges for Teaching Visual Literacy in Science: Through the Lens of Content Area Literacy

To mediate the difficulty of reading science texts, common wisdom has prompted authors and publishers to include large amounts of visual data to make the ideas within the text more concrete and visual. This practice of including extensive graphics within science texts has been increasing rapidly during the past decades, as demonstrated by measures of frequency and variety of visual representations (Martins, 2002; Metros, 2008; Walpole, 1999), and by observations of online, multi-modal texts. Obviously, graphical displays of visual data have many advantages over simple linear texts, but these advantages are only realized when the readers can interpret them.

To date, graphics and visual models have unfortunately not proven to be a panacea for easing young readers’ challenges during science text comprehension. For example, in a critique of middle school physical science texts, Hubisz (2000) suggested that the increase of graphical adjuncts (e.g., visual data sources, graphs, diagrams) can actually reduce middle school readers’ understanding of the science. Through his observations, he maintained that middle school students are not skilled at integrating information from multiple sources and may become distracted by the intended visual scaffolding. This distraction may be a result of graphics making the comprehension task more complicated because of their endemic interpretational challenges (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006; Wheeler, 1990) or because the presence of visual images creates a new task of integrating textual and visual information (Hannus & Hyona, 1999; Hegarty, Carpenter, & Just, 1996; Hegarty & Just, 1993). Additionally, students may not have the skills needed to accurately interpret visual information, which can be deemed visual literacy or diagrammatic literacy (Stern, Aprea, & Ebner, 2003).