Technological tools for visual thinking : What does the research tell us ?

Educational systems tend to emphasise the verbal, symbolic and numerical modes of learning though recently, there has been a wave of change in education, with an increasing emphasis on visual literacy. In everyday life and in learning, visual information is used to interpret experience and build understanding. This can be illustrated in three ways. First, visual thinking is part of the way we reason, such as when we extract of information from a map, chart or table and represent and express it in language. Second, visual thinking can be integral to problem solving, as when we need to use a diagram to explain, document, calculate or show the steps involved in reaching a solution. Third, visual representation can play a role in communication, for instance using diagrammatic and visual forms to communicate information, represent data and show relationships. This paper aims to give an overview of current theories and research on visual thinking and how it relates to learning. Examples of how technologies can enhance the visual dimension of communication and learning are discussed. Defining visual thinking Is a picture worth a thousand words? It seems so, as historical accounts of scientific discovery and invention have shown that visualisation is a powerful cognitive tool (Rieber, 1995). The term visualisation is familiar to us from common usage and fundamentally means ‘to form and manipulate a mental image’. In everyday life, visualisation is essential to problem solving and spatial reasoning as it enables people to use concrete means to grapple with abstract images. The process of visualisation may simply entail the formation images, with paper and pencil or even mentally, to investigate, discover and understand concepts, facts and ideas. The original meaning of the Greek word for “to prove” in Mathematics, (deiknumi) was to make visible or show, indicting the close link between demonstrating understanding and having the capacity to show or draw a proof. However, the world of mathematics teaching has oscillated between periods when visualisation was regarded as important in pedagogy and eras when it was viewed as hindrance. Practices in mathematics problem solving are often based on linguistic representations that make use of logical connectives in sequential reasoning. Recent research in mathematics teaching (Diezmann, 1997) however has advocated the use of diagrammatic explanation to assist comprehension. Pictorial and visual forms of representation can offer advantages over text-based resources by offering scope for: