Students are building upon their skills in visual thinking.

A recent staff training session, led by Humanities and TOK teacher Alex Hall, on Dual Coding and Cognitive Load Theory, served as a useful reminder about the power of using images in teaching.

Dual Coding is simply the combination of text and images. Allan Pavio discovered that our memory has two codes (or channels) that deal with visual and verbal stimuli. Whilst it stores them independently, they are linked (linking words to images). These linked memories make retrieval much easier. The word or image stimulates retrieval of the other.
In Human Technologies, students also explore the power of images during the Year 8 Unit: Technologies for Exploring & Expressing Meaning. This unit introduces students to ways in which they are able to capture and share aspects of their worlds through visual communication. Students are sensitised to the process of looking and are encouraged to develop higher conceptual precision when reflecting on, talking about, or creating visual representations.

The recent CPD session inspired HT teachers to encourage Year 10 students to revisit and build upon their skills in visual thinking. Students worked together to encode the complex information they had researched in their recent studies of evolution, and carefully selected images and icons to help present what they had learned in visual format to their peers. Research shows that when using text and image combined, information is more likely to stay in our long term memory; another advantage to their endeavours.