By William Osborne and Julian Yang, VI Form

The Effect of Visual Support on Learning: A Psychology Case Study

Abstract

Memorization plays a major role in education, especially throughout grade school and middle school. Despite this, many teachers support studying for memorization based tests by only repeating the information needed until it is stuck in the student’s brain. This study examines the positive effect visuals have on the brain’s ability to memorize words. Past experiments have found that the inclusion of images with text would increase a person’s ability to memorize and recall information. To test this, participants were given a short period of time to memorize ten words and then recall them. The same process was then repeated, but with a different list which also contained images of the words. The results showed that participants’ ability to memorize was facilitated with the use of images. One possible explanation is that the brain is able to mentally picture the image when remembering the words, giving it a concrete example to pull from instead of only a few letters on a page. 

Keywords:  Memorization, Visual Learning, Information Recall, Learning Strategy