Visual Displays in Basal Readers and Social Studies Textbooks

The primary and immediate purpose of the work reported in this chapter is to validate a system for analyzing the form, function, and utility of visual displays of information appearing in text. A secondary purpose is to compare the use of visual displays in basal reading texts with their use in social studies texts; presumably such a comparison would involve a contrast between texts providing instruction in decoding and sight word skills as students learn to read and texts providing instruction in comprehension as students read to learn. But the ultimate goal of the line of research of which this work is a small piece is to understand the cognitive and contextual conditions in which different presentational media (for instance, text, photographs, artwork, maps, diagrams, charts, or tables) help or hinder written communication; put differently, our long-rang’ goal is to understand when a “picture” (in our case, a visual display) is worth a thousand words and when it might not be worth even two or three.