Importance Of Visual Stimuli When Teaching
Humans experience the world through their senses, and are exceptionally visual creatures. Outside stimuli are experienced and those experiences provide us with information and ideas. With that in mind, engaging the senses in the classroom is critical, and one of the most important of those senses is vision.
Learning with visual stimuli is “brain compatible”
Most researchers agree that utilizing visual stimuli is a brain friendly teaching method. In this context, a method is considered to be brain compatible if it falls within a modality that students are comfortable with. The vast majority of students are visual or tactile learners, with over 65% of them tending towards visual learning. Even for those who are not categorized as visual learners in the educational sense are visual learners in a very fundamental way.
There’s a significant body of research that supports this. When accompanied by visual cues, information becomes far easier to remember and retrieve. Why is that? Essentially, the human brain is primarily a processor for images. The part of our brain that processes verbal information is quite small in comparison to that which handles images.
Consider the power of brand logos, for example. Even when the name of the brand doesn’t accompany the logo, as in most marketing items featuring Starbuck’s siren, many people will immediately make the association.
Studies have shown that even internally visualizing information can aid memory retention and out performs verbal practice. In one study students were asked to remember multiple sets of three words, such as kitten, surfboard, and river. Those that studied by repeating the words over and over again didn’t perform nearly as well as those that were instructed to visualize the words in a memorable way (like a kitten riding a surfboard on a river).
Varieties of visual tools
Incorporating visual tools in the classroom is simple because there are such a wide variety of different types of visual tools. Illustrations, photographs, video, concept maps, graphs and charts, and many other visual stimuli can be used to great effect in the classroom. Photos and art depicting historical events, for example, can help students connect with the past. Graphs and charts are excellent ways to illustrate comparisons and changes. Watching a video of a scene from a play brings the text to life.
Educators should be working with students’ natural inclinations to learn, and that means incorporating visual stimuli.
Tags: education, visual learners, visual stimuli