Effects of integrating digital visual materials with textbook scans in the classroom

This work examines the effects of treating learners in a classroom to digital visual materials on a shared display, while interleaving such materials with scanned copies of relevant textbook pages. Forty-six ninth-grade students in a public school in Bangalore (India) were divided into two groups and given instruction in Science and Literature, the first group (control) being exposed to digital visual materials in both classes while the second (treatment) to the same materials interspersed with digitally-scanned copies of textbook pages. Students in the treatment group outperformed those in the control group on tasks involving recall and recognition of the visual materials (although the gap was significant only for recall-based tasks). Our results suggest that digitized versions of textbooks are useful in improving students’ retention of visual materials utilized during classroom instruction.