Research School Network: Reading text with images, pupils see the bigger picture

As Louisa makes her way through a list of comprehension questions about the diary extracts in front of her, she pauses periodically to refer to a series of images that her teacher has printed out for her.

The pictures are there to remind her of key information that she needs to refer to, and the vocabulary she should be discussing in her responses.

Louisa is one of the most able students in her class. Visual support resources are usually reserved for pupils with special educational needs, but Louisa finds the pictures just as helpful as any pupil with SEND would do.

As a primary SENDCo, I regularly produce visual resources to support the students I work with. I use symbols and images in visual timetables, vocabulary sheets, functional skills resources and task boards to make them more accessible to learners with SEND, with English as an additional language, or who are working at a lower attainment level. I am proud to say these resources are used effectively with these pupils across the school.

However, in a recent inset session about reading, I noticed that the reading lead used symbols and visuals to support, maybe even correct, the perceptions of higher-ability pupils during ​“Drop everything and read” (DEAR) sessions.

He used a strategy that involved top-down processing (Weinstein et al., 2019), allowing the reader to bring their prior knowledge to learning through direct interaction and immersion. He would read a short extract from the DEAR text and then recount his own personal response to the text aloud.

By doing this, he explicitly modelled to the pupils a strategy which allowed them to use their own preconceived notions to help them understand a text as they read it, in line with guidance about metacognition and self-regulation published by the Education Endowment Foundation (Quigley, A. et al. 2018). To consolidate and correct the preconceptions, he had selected simple symbols and visuals, which he displayed on the interactive whiteboard to help pupils to understand vocabulary, locate setting, and give further understanding to the text, while reducing cognitive load.

I left the inset thinking how simple and effective his visuals were. They consolidated and supported the learning for all pupils, allowing the reading session to continue at pace. This motivated me to further research visuals in education and to share the symbols and visuals that we already had embedded for SEND, EAL and lower ability pupils, with all of our pupils.

My research started with Sweller et al. (2011), who explains that cognitive load theory relates to the amount of information that working memory can hold at one time. Since working memory has a limited capacity, teachers should avoid overloading it with too much information, or too many activities, that don’t directly contribute to learning. Sweller et al. state that one way to reduce cognitive load is to incorporate visuals and symbols.

I related this learning back to an earlier inset which discussed the seven-step metacognitive model developed by the EEF (Quigley, et al. 2018). I began to consider how visuals could support step two of this model (“explicitly teach metacognitive strategies”), while also making sure that pupils’ brains had the capacity to evaluate and analyse, thereby reducing cognitive load and enabling all our pupils to progress through the model with more success.

Many of the teachers at our school would say it is already common practice to use symbols and visuals to support reading, but I would argue that we are not always doing this as well as we could be. Research by Herlinger et al (2017) has proven that using visuals is only effective if we adhere to the principles of multimedia learning (Mayer, 2005). There are three particularly relevant principles to take note of:

● Coherence principle: pupils learn best when distracting materials are not included and teachers simply cut out the extras and use only the information that the learner needs.

● Spatial contiguity principle: pupils learn best when relevant text and visuals are physically close together.

● Modality principle: information about a visual or symbol should be explained verbally rather than as a text, so learners can listen and refer to visuals – defined by Paivio (1971) as ​“dual coding”.

So, how did we apply these findings to support rolling out more explicit use of symbols to support reading with all of our learners?

First, in a whole-school training session, we discussed how dual coding could support the development of our pupils’ metacognition. We then began by applying best practice around dual coding in our DEAR time.

What does this involve? Let’s take the example of Year 3 reading comprehension assessments. In these tests, pupils are exposed to large amounts of text that they must read and answer questions on. The Questions are often written under the text, or on the opposite page, and they need to scan the text to find the answer.

Initially, we break the text up and place the question directly next to the answers in the text, in line with the spatial contiguity principle. We also devise dual coding symbols to describe key reading strategies such as skimming and scanning. Slowly, we then remove this scaffolding until they are completing the questions unaided in assessments.

Have these new approaches been making a difference? Well, we still have a long way to go before dual coding is evident across the curriculum, but staff are now aware of the theory and can see its relevance in relation to how it fits into our school.

Now, when I observe and support as a SENCo I am always looking to see whether students have thought at a deeper level when they are planning the ​‘what?’, ​‘why?’, ​‘how?’ and ​‘what if?’ of their lessons.

By consciously thinking about the information they are sharing and how they should present that information, both verbally and visually, we can better support the learning of all of our pupils, not just those with SEND.

Sarah Butler
Sendco at Billesley Research School.