Visual principles

1. Describe the roles that visuals play in instruction.

Visual-based lessons are not always superior to conventional instruction in terms of student achievement. We should keep in mind that success of visual instruction depends on the subject matter, practises of the teacher and students’ visual intelligence.

However, it’d be safe to say that visuals play a huge role in providing concrete referent for ideas. Words or sounds may not resemble the thing they stand for but visuals are iconic, meaning that, they always have some kind of resemblance to the thing they represent. They motivate learners by attracting their attention. Visuals also simplify complex information, and make it easier to store and retrieve such information. On the other hand, visuals like flow charts can serve as an organizer, too. And finally, using visuals helps students to learn better by not wasting their limited processing capacity with two verbal streams of information

2. Describe visual literacy in your own words.

We are surrounded by visuals in every aspect of our lives. They all serve different purposes: they may be used to give information about a topic and other times they may be warning us against danger. But the value of these visuals depends on our  interpretation of the visual message. That’s why literacy is not only referred to reading and writing like it once was. Instead, the term “visual literacy” is used to refer the ability to understand and create visual messages.

3. Identify two general strategies  that you may use to teach visual literacy.

First, we have “input strategies”. We do not automatically learn from the visual we see. That’s why we use these strategies to ensure that learners can decode these visuals by practicing visual analysis skills.

“Output strategies” can be used to help learners to encode visuals. Expressing themselves and communicating with others will definitely increase their understanding of the media.
4. Describe the factors that influence students’  decoding of visuals.

Children under the age of 12 are likely to single out a specific element when they’re asked what they see in a visual unlike older students who tend to summarize the whole scene and come to conclusion about the meaning of it. That’s why abstract symbols and still pictures should be excluded rather than included.

Students’ cultural backgrounds affect their perceptions of visual materials. Students who don’t have first hand experience about the scenario in a visual will interpret it differently. That’s why we should take our learners’ backgrounds into consideration while preparing and/or selecting visual materials.

Students’ visual preferences are not necessarily the best choice for instruction. Most learners prefer colored visuals, but unless the color is related to the content it doesn’t make any difference on the amount of learning. Moreover, learners prefer realistic visuals over abstract representations, but usually line drawings may communicate better. Teachers need to fine a balance between the two.

5. Describe the factors that influence students’ encoding of visuals.

Because of the fact that children grow up exposed to movies and television, they expect the visuals used in instruction to be similarly packaged and sequenced. That’s why, especially with primary school children, creative activities that call for arranging and making visuals should be preferred.

6. State in your own words the goals that good visual design aims to achieve.

A good visual design aims to achieve four basic goals.

All viewers should be able to see the words and images on a visual for that visual to start serving it’s purpose. That’s why a good visual design aims to ensure legibility by removing obstacles that might prevent you from transferring your message.

One of the reasons we use visuals is to help learners understand complex or abstract ideas easier. So, a good visual design should reduce students’ efforts to interpret visual message by using processes such as establishing an underlying pattern.

A visual design must be appealing to students, or they won’t pay attention to it which will lead to failure in terms of active engagement. That’s the reason why a good visual design must include elements that’ll help gain and hold your audience’s attention.

And finally, for a good visual to achieve it’s purpose, we should help students focus their attention on the most important parts of the message by using design and color cues.

7. Regarding the visual design process, characterize the qualities that a designer would look for in the individual visual and verbal elements of the design, including elements that add appeal.

Visual elements can be divided into three categories and they’re selected depending on the learning task. What designers look for in realistic visuals such as photographs is showing the actual object and heighten the degree of realism. But realistic visuals do not necessarily mean better communication. In fact, realism can prevent communication and learning to some extent. Analogic visuals should convey a concept/topic by showing examples which show similarities and designers use these visuals to help learners recall their prior knowledge. The qualities a designer would look for in organizational visuals is to help students organize the content by showing relationships among key elements of a topic.

In the evaluation of a verbal element, designers look for the style of the lettering. It should be consistent with and appropriate to other elements of the visual.

For a visual to be effective, it should capture and hold viewer’s attention. Designers use surprise, texture and interaction, the elements that add appeal, to achieve this. To grab the audience’s attention, there must be surprising elements, texture can be used to convey a clearer idea of the subject and asking viewers to respond to visual displays can make the visual much more effective.

8. Describe the factors that a designer would manipulate in establishing an underlying pattern to the design.

After selecting the elements, designers use alignment, shape, balance, style, color scheme and color appeal to establish an underlying pattern.

Designers arrange the visual

and verbal elements by aligning them with reference to the edges of the display. Another way to do that is to put those elements into a shape that is already familiar to the viewer. Also, balance must be achieved by distributing the weight of the elements on each side of an axis. Designers keep in mind that different audiences call for different design styles and that while selecting a color scheme one must consider the harmoniousness of the colors. Color for backgrounds and highlights play a huge role here. And finally, when choosing colors for instructional materials, designers consider the emotional response they’re seeking and decide accordingly to color appeal.

9. Describe the factors that a designer would manipulate in arranging the visual and verbal elements to achieve clear communication, reduce effort in interpreting, increase active engagement, and focus viewer attention.

A designer uses the principle of proximity to helps students relate elements to each other which will reduce their effort in interpreting.

Designers can use directionals to prevent learners from scanning a visual without paying any attention and help them focus on a particular element.

Important elements can be pointed out by designers by using the simple rule of figure-ground contrast, where the words are written in a color that is in contrast with background color.

To achieve clear communication while using multiple visuals, designers should be careful with the consistency of rules since breaking the rules causes learners to show tremendous amount of effort to interpret the message.

10. List various roles that color can play in enhancing the impact of visual displays.

The color scheme we select for the visual display can help enhancing the impact of it by establishing an underlying pattern. The viewers will linger over and remember the display if the colors are in harmony.

The colors have effects on the viewers’ emotions. Cool and warm colors bring out different responses from different age or cultural groups. By manipulating the color appeal, we can enhance the impact of our visual display.

And finally, figure-ground contrast in which the written words are in contrast with the background color can enhance the impact of visual displays by focusing viewers’ attention on essential materials