Jennifer Kaminski, research scientist in psychology and member, Cognitive Developmental Lab, and Vladimir Sloutsky, professor of psychology and director of the lab, are authors of a new study demonstrating that adding captivating visuals to a textbook lesson to attract children’s interest may sometimes make it harder for them to learn.

Children who were taught using graphs with images (like shoes or flowers) on the bars didn't learn the lesson as well and sometimes tried counting the images rather than relying on the height of the bars. Kaminski and Sloutsky found that 6- to 8-year-old children best learned how to read simple bar graphs when the graphs were plain and a single color. The study involved 122 students in kindergarten, first and second grade.

“Graphs with pictures may be more visually appealing and engaging to children than those without pictures. However, engagement in the task does not guarantee that children are focusing their attention on the information and procedures they need to learn. Instead, they may be focusing on superficial features,” said Kaminski.

The problem of distracting visuals is not just an academic issue, according to the authors. In the study, Kaminski and Sloutsky cite real-life examples of colorful, engaging—and possibly confusing—bar graphs in educational materials aimed at children, as well as in the popular media. And when they asked 16 kindergarten and elementary school teachers whether they would use the visually appealing graphs featured in this study, all of them said they would. Intuitively, most of these teachers felt that the graphs with the pictures would be more effective for instruction than the graphs without, according to the researchers.

“When designing instructional material, we need to consider children’s developing ability to focus their attention and make sure that the material helps them focus on the right things,” Kaminski said.

The findings apply beyond learning graphs and mathematics, the authors said.

The study was funded in part from grants by the federal Institute of Educational Sciences and the National Science Foundation. The findings appear online in the Journal of Educational Psychology and will appear in a future print edition.

Read the entire press release, courtesy of Jeff Grabmeier, director, Ohio State’s research and innovation communications.

The Department of Psychology’s Cognitive Developmental Lab supports research on how and why cognition changes in the course of development and learning. How do limited cognitive abilities of infants evolve into truly remarkable behaviors of older children and adults? How do simple perceptual groupings of young infants give rise to abstract concepts later in development? How do people develop the ability to strategically focus on some aspects of information while ignoring others? And what are the interrelationships among the development of attention, memory, language, and generalization? In an attempt to answer these questions, researchers study infants, children, and adults.