Advantages And Disadvantages Of Using Visual Aids

According to a research from Wilkin (1997), it is important to take note that there is some research that says Visual Aids can produce not just advantages but disadvantages as well in terms of teaching. According to the study, the purpose of the use of visual aids in teaching is use in familiarizing but the downside of it is formulating unrelated knowledge. Unlike the use of the tradition teaching wherein teachers used to self-explain their lessons, it hinders the student from making other interpretation in it. For example with a use of charts and diagrams in a lesson, teachers can just present it and assumed that the students understands it since it is self-explanatory, but what happens is that the students was just familiarize with the diagram but doesn’t gain any information from it or they formulate their own interpretation based on what they see.

However, with the use of visuals it can say that it can easily able to represent the components and configurations of the systems; it may be more difficult to display the same content through language (Larkin & Simon, 1987). Many studies have shown that both learners who created their own text illustrations and learners provided with text and illustrations performed similarly. Both groups outperformed learners only provided with text (Hall et al., 1997). This only means that providing visual aids maximize learning outcomes to students for it broaden their interpretation rather than providing text alone. But on the other hand, it also explains that when it comes to spatial properties, the use of language is suggest for it is much easier way than the use of visualizations.

Provided that there is an advantage and disadvantage in using both visualization and self-explain teaching styles, in Mayer’s theory of multimedia, it was stated there that verbal and visual information are linked to each other which makes the learner understand better by learning both to formulate information all at once. In this case, given the differences in the use of visual and verbal teaching styles on how the learners construct, understand and process information, better teaching styles cannot be determine.

References

1. Bobek, E., & Tversky, B. (2016). Creating visual explanations improves learning. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 1
2. Kaswa, J. (2015) The Effect of Visual Learning Aids on Student’s Academic Performance in Public Secondary Schools, A Case of Magu District Secondary Schools. The Open University of Tanzania.
3. Pickard, J. (2017) Visual Formative Assessment and Learning Styles. Digital Collection @ Dordt