Development of Dynamic Usage of Strategies for Integrating Text and Picture Information in Secondary Schools

Students are frequently required to integrate text and picture information into coherent knowledge structures. This raises the questions of how students deal with texts and how they deal with graphics when they try to integrate the two sources of information, and whether there are differences between students from different school types and grades. Forty students from Grades 5 and 8, from higher and lower tiers of the German school system, were asked to process and integrate text and pictures in order to answer items from different hierarchy-levels of a text-picture integration taxonomy. Students’ eye movements were recorded and analyzed. Results suggest a fundamental asymmetry between the functions of text and pictures, associated with different processing strategies. Texts are more likely to be used according to a coherence-formation strategy, whereas pictures are more likely to be used on demand as visual cognitive tools according to an information selection strategy. Students from different tiers of schooling revealed different adaptability with regard to the requirements of combining text and graphic information.