The importance of full graphic display in a graphic organizer to facilitate discourse comprehension

Abstract

In order to examine the importance of fully representing graphic information items in graphic aids to facilitate comprehension of explanatory texts, we established and randomly assigned fifty university students into the following four groups: (a) participants who study the text without the aid, (b) participants who study the text with the aid, whose literal (key words) and graphic (arrows, boxes, etc.) information items are fully displayed, (c) participants who study the text with the aid, whose graphic information items are fully displayed but whose literal information items are partially displayed, and (d) participants who study the text with the aid, whose literal and graphic information items are partially displayed. The results of two kinds of comprehension tests "textbase and situation model" revealed that groups (b) and (c) outperformed groups (a) and (d). These findings suggest that graphic aids can facilitate students' text comprehension when graphic information items are fully displayed and literal information items are displayed either fully or partially; however, the aid cannot facilitate comprehension when both literal and graphic elements are displayed partially.