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Helping the diagram user |
9 Helping the diagram user |
Making diagrams more manageable
The instructional success of a diagram is only partly due to its design. Even poorly designed diagrams can be made instructionally more effective by embedding them in a suitable context.
How making existing diagrams more successful as aids to instruction?
Increasing learner involvement
How preventing the learner from ignoring the diagram:
Most instructors are used to thinking of diagrams as a solution to instructional problems - rather than having the potential to be problems in themselves.
Encourage activities involving various types of mental manipulation of a diagram's constituents:
Guide the learner thru the types of mental processes that will help them to fulfil the diagram's potential as an instructional tool. Long-term goal: helping learners become independently capable of dealing with diagrams in general in a systematic and instructionally productive manner.
Give learners explicit guidance in the form of a checklist of questions they can ask themselves working with the diagram:
The challenge goes beyond designing better diagrams:
Deeper diagram processing
Reasons why the content of everyday pictures is easier to process:
However, diagrams are an extremely concentrated and artificial form of representation.
Manipulations for deeper processing
Justifying the graphic treatment of an entity within the diagram, or rendering used on an entity
Classifying the entities used in the diagram
Tasks of classifying diagram components into these categories
Comparing different representations of the same subject matter
Comparing different parts of the same diagram
Making modifications to existing diagrams
Linking the material in the diagram to existing background knowledge
Transforming aspects of the diagram into another representational form
Imagery Visual comprehension and memory is part of what is required to develop a proper understanding of the subject matter and be able to recall it effectively. Our minds store some information in the form of images and some information in a far more abstract propositional form (facts and their relations). These two memory stores are linked.
Encouraging learners to develop well-formed mental images from a diagram:
- type and location of entities, - overall appearance of each entity, - distinguishing characteristics, relations, - constructing a fleshed-out representation of the situation, - putting back the stripped out items, - making a dynamic mental model from a static diagram of the situation.
The first of these image types is concerned with the superficial visuo-spatial characteristics of the diagram
while the second is concerned with the meaning of those characteristics
in terms of the subject matter represented.
Using a series of interrelated diagrams to present a series of different views or aspects of a given piece of subject matter: developing mental images that integrate these different diagrams into a coherent whole.
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