How Representational Pictures Enhance Students’ Performance and Test-Taking Pleasure in Low-Stakes Assessment

Pictures are often used in standardized educational large-scale assessment (LSA), but their impact on test parameters has received little attention up until now. Even less is known about pictures’ affective effects on students in testing (i.e., test-taking pleasure and motivation). However, such knowledge is crucial for a focused application of multiple representations in LSA. Therefore, this study investigated how adding representational pictures (RPs) to text-based item stems affects (1) item difficulty and (2) students’ test-taking pleasure. An experimental study with N = 305 schoolchildren was conducted, using 48 manipulated parallel science items (text-only vs. text-picture) in a rotated multimatrix design to realize within-subject measures. Students’ general cognitive abilities, reading abilities, and background variables were assessed to consider potential interactions between RPs’ effects and students’ performance. Students also rated their item-solving pleasure for each item. Results from item-response theory (IRT) model comparisons showed that RPs only reduced item difficulty when pictures visualized information mandatory for solving the task, while RPs substantially enhanced students’ test-taking pleasure even when they visualized optional context information. Overall, our findings suggest that RPs have a positive cognitive and affective influence on students’ performance in LSA (i.e., multimedia effect in testing) and should be considered more frequently.

Semiotic foundations of the study of pictures

Are pictures signs? That pictures are signs is evident in the case of pictures that “represent”, but is not “representation” a synonym of “sign”, and if so, can non-representational paintings be considered signs? Some semioticians have declared that such pictures cannot be signs because they have no referent, and in phenomenology the opinion prevails that they are not signs because they are phenomena sui generis. The present approach follows C. S. Peirce’s semiotics: representational and non-representational pictures and even mental pictures are signs. How and why pictures without a referent can nevertheless be defined as signs is examined on the basis of examples of monochrome paintings and historical maps that show non-existing or imaginary territories. The focus of attention is on their semiotic object and, in the case of non-representational paintings, on their interpretation as genuine icons, not in the sense of signs that represent most accurately, but in the sense of signs that represent nothing but themselves, i.e., self-referential signs.

The “Style Scheme” Grounds Perception of Paintings

We studied the formation of style scheme (identification of the style that characterizes an artist) presenting 100 participants aesthetic visual stimuli. Participants were Spanish university students who volunteered: 72 women, 28 men of mean age 22.8 yr. Among those 50 were enrolled in History of Art and 50 students in Psychology. Stimuli belonged to different categories—High Art (pictures of well-known artists, like Van Gogh)/Popular Art (decorative pictures like Christmas postcards) and Representational (pictures with explicit meaning content, like a landscape)/Abstract (pictures without explicit meaning content, like Pollock's colored stains). Analysis using Signal Detection Theory techniques focused on how participants discriminate representational and abstract pictures. With High An stimuli, participants can better discriminate representational paintings than abstract ones. However, the difference in discrimination between representational and abstract pictures diminishes among participants studying History of Art. It seems that prior education in art favors forming style schemes and to some extent enables the participant to detect the “meaning” in High Art abstract paintings.

Using Mnemonic Strategies to Teach Information about U.S. Presidents: A Classroom-Based Investigation

Over a six-week period, students with learning disabilities in an inner-city middle school were taught the chronological orders of 32 U.S. presidents. For three weeks, they were taught using a modified mnemonic keyword-pegword strategy. For the next three weeks, they were taught using rehearsal and representational pictures. Two weeks subsequent to the six-week instructional period, students were given a delayed posttest in which they were asked to provide the numerical order of the president, given a president name; and the president's name, given the numerical order. Results revealed a significant main effect for instructional condition and a significant condition-by-response interaction, suggesting that information was processed differently, depending on instructional condition. Implications for classroom instruction are provided.

Improving Reasoning and Recall: The Differential Effects of Elaborative Interrogation and Mnemonic Elaboration

This investigation sought to determine whether elaborative interrogation techniques would facilitate recall of information relevant to, but not included in, mnemonic and representational pictures. Fifty-three adolescents with learning disabilities or mild mental retardation were taught information about nine reasons for dinosaur extinction, ranked in order of plausibility. In the direct teaching condition, students were provided with each ordered reason and an explanation for why that reason may have resulted in dinosaur extinction. In the elaborative interrogation condition, students were provided with each ordered reason and prompted and questioned to provide an explanation for each. In the mnemonic elaborative interrogation condition, students were provided with mnemonic peg-words to facilitate recall of the ordered reasons for dinosaur extinction and also coached and prompted to provide explanations. Students' recall of ordered reasons was higher in the mnemonic elaborative interrogation condition, and students in the two elaborative interrogation conditions recalled more explanations than did students in the direct teaching condition. Further, students in both elaborative interrogation conditions more accurately linked reasons with explanations for those reasons. Findings are discussed with respect to previous findings of mnemonic instruction. Implications for teaching students with mild cognitive disabilities are provided.

Immediate and Long-Term Retention for Pictorial and Verbal Stimuli

Although nouns of high imagery are generally recalled better than nouns of low imagery, both Palermo and Yuille have shown that retention for the former decreases with time. The present study tested the hypothesis that this decreased effectiveness occurs because images stored in long-term memory are accessible only through their verbal labels. 64 subjects were presented pictures and later asked to draw them or provide one-word descriptions. Other subjects were presented words and asked to recall them or draw representational pictures. Recall was tested immediately and 48 hr. later. Regardless of recall mode, subjects viewing pictures showed significantly greater recall than subjects viewing words, and for all subjects immediate recall was better.

A New Visual Aesthetic Sensitivity Test: I. Construction and Psychometric Properties

This paper reports progress in construction of a new test of visual aesthetic sensitivity, differing from previous tests in that the items were drawn by an experienced artist of international reputation. There are 42 sets of 2 non-representational pictures, differing in that one of these has been changed by the incorporation of certain intentional design faults; there is thus a “right” and a “wrong” picture, and it is the task of the subject to discover the right answer. Eight practising artists validated the construction by agreeing 100% in their answers with the key. The test was administered to 111 male and female students, and 369 male and female children. There were no sex differences, no very significant correlations with intelligence, and very little by way of correlations with personality traits. The mean score of the children was 30, that of the students 35, a very significant difference. Within the group of children, however, there was no correlation with age. The distribution of scores was skewed, with easy items (high scores) predominating. The difficulty levels of the items were similar for adults and children, male and female. The internal reliability of the test was .84 for the adults. The retest reliability of the test was .70 for girls and .32 for boys, but the samples were small.