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 the key information that she needs to refer to, and the vocabulary she should be discussing in her responses.

Visual support resources are usually reserved for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities, but Louisa is one of the most able students in her class - and she finds the pictures to be 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 those who are working at a lower attainment level. I’m proud to say that these resources are used effectively with these pupils across the school.

However, during 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) activities.

What did this look like? The reading lead used a metacognitive strategy based around “top-down processing”: a process in which the brain draws on existing knowledge and assumptions to help us understand the big picture, before focusing on the details (Weinstein et al, 2019). 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 a strategy in which pupils could 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. These helped pupils to understand the details of the text - such as vocabulary and setting - without increasing cognitive load.

I left the Inset reflecting on 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 got me thinking: what did research have to say about how we use visuals in education? Could the symbols I had already embedded for SEND learners at our school be helpful for all of our pupils? I set out to learn more.

My research started with Sweller et al (2011), who explain that cognitive load theory relates to the amount of information that working memory can hold at any 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 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 pupils to progress through the model with more success.

Many of the teachers at our school would say that it is already common practice to use symbols and visuals to support reading, but I’d argue that we are not always doing this as well as we could be.

Research by Herrlinger 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:

• The 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.
• The spatial contiguity principle: pupils learn best when relevant text and visuals are physically close together.
• The 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 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 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 pupils need to scan the text to find the answer.

We initially break the text up and place the questions directly next to the answers in the text, in line with the spatial contiguity principle. We’ve also devised dual coding symbols to describe key reading strategies, such as skimming and scanning. Slowly, we remove this scaffolding until pupils are completing the questions unaided.

We still have a long way to go before dual coding is evident across the curriculum, but staff are aware of the theory and can see its relevance. When I observe and support, I’m always looking to see whether teachers have thought at a deeper level when they are planning the “what?”, “why?”, “how?” and “what if?” of their lessons when it comes to using visuals and metacognition.

By consciously thinking about the information that they’re sharing and how they should present it, both verbally and visually, teachers can better support the learning of all of their pupils, not just those with SEND.

Sarah Butler is Sendco at Billesley Research School in Birmingham

This article originally appeared in the 14 August 2020 issue under the headline “Reading text with images, pupils see the bigger picture”

References

Caviglioli, O (2019) Dual Coding with Teachers (John Catt Educational Ltd)

Herrlinger, S, Hoffler, T, Opfermann, M, and Leuter, D (2017) “When do pictures help learning from expository text? Multimedia and modality effects in primary schools”, Res Sci Educ, 47: 685-704

Mayer, RE (2005) The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (Cambridge University Press)

Paivio, A (1971) Imagery and Verbal Processes (Holt, Rinehart and Winston)

Quigley, A, Muijs, D and Stringer, E (2018) Metacognition and Self Regulation (Education Endowment Foundation)

Weinstein, Y, Sumeracki, M, and Caviglioli, O (2019) Understanding How We Learn (Routledge)