I’m a visual thinker. This means that if you ask me for directions to the library down the street, I will give you vivid images with colorful landmarks that point you in the direction of where you need to go. I dream in color and I perform well on tests when I’ve reviewed a visual diagram beforehand. In school, I loved looking at charts and receiving handouts to different lessons. Research shows that I’m not alone in this learning preference.
Visual learners make up more than 60 percent of students in a regular classroom.1 This means that over half of the students in your class may have specific needs based on their dominant visual learning style. Through my education and my career devoted to helping people learn to think and learn, I have found this statement to be overwhelmingly true: Visual learners need to actually see what you’re saying.
How can you spot a visual learner?
Visual learners in the classroom are easy to spot; they’re the students who may do some of the following things:
- organize their markers and crayons by color
- look up as though they are trying to see something in mid-air before answering a question
- highlight and organize their notes from a lesson
- respond well to charts, graphs, maps and visual diagrams
- outline readings and notes while studying.2
What are visual learning tools?
Visual learning tools like graphic organizers, webs, idea maps, concept maps and more are words or images arranged to represent an individual’s understanding of the relationship between ideas. The spatial organization of objects is not necessarily linear in a visual diagram, but rather dependent upon the relationship between ideas. Visual tools guide learning and help students, who are visual or not, to process thinking, make connections between ideas and structure thoughts while pre-writing, brainstorming, thinking critically, problem solving and communicating visually.
What helps visual learners learn?
Graphic organizers, supplemental images, diagrams, charts, etc. in combination with lectures help visual learners grasp the information more clearly and retain it long after the class ends. Visual learning, as I mentioned in my previous post “Visual Tools for Reading Comprehension,” is a powerful tool in helping students improve comprehension and retention in not just reading but lectures as well.
How can teachers introduce visual learning?
Our research shows that providing a visual learning tool with your lessons like the ones listed above or assigning projects with visual diagrams, help your students better comprehend, integrate and retain knowledge. For many students, webs, concept maps and idea maps mean the difference between struggling to comprehend and organize thoughts versus grasping all of the materials clearly. Students’ comprehension and retention will show in their testing results.
I talk to many educators who are always looking for ways to help students test well. One suggestion came from a teacher helping her students prepare for a state writing test. This teacher taught students to use Inspiration® as a valuable tool for pre-writing. For the test, she instructed students to use the inside back cover of the testing booklet to map out main points and order the ideas by number. Since the students didn’t have Inspiration, which allows ideas to be dragged around and organized on the screen, the numbers helped organize students’ thoughts for their essay. The students’ writing on the state test improved dramatically from the year before because of this visual strategy.
Introducing visuals into materials and teaching visual thinking techniques will help students grasp lessons, retain knowledge and give them the skills and strategies to study and learn more effectively. Whether students predominantly learn visually or not, adding graphic representations to the delivery of information can engage students, stimulate learning and help all students – to see what you are saying!
Take our poll and tell us if you’re a visual learner! Thanks for reading. See you next week!
Mona Westhaver
President and Co-founder, Inspiration Software
