Abstract
It is fairly clear that story-relevant pictures help children recall story information. But do pictures showing details distract students’ attention from central information, and thus hinder recall? In this study of second and fifth graders, such pictures (as well as subject-generated images) facilitated recall of both central and incidental information contained in single-sentence mini-stories.
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This research was funded by the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Individualized Schooling, supported in part as a research and development center by funds from the National Institute of Education (Center Contract OB-NIE-G-78-0217). The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the positions or policy of the NIE, and no official endorsement by the NIE should be inferred. The authors are grateful to the staff and students of Hoyt, Midvale, and Thoreau Schools in Madison, Wisconsin, for enabling us to conduct the study, and to Trudy Dunham for helping develop the materials.
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Levin, J.R., Bender, B.G. & Pressley, M. Pictures, imagery, and children’s recall of central versus peripheral sentence information. ECTJ 27, 89–95 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02765330
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02765330