Do You See Visualization as an Effective Reading Comprehension Strategy? And, for Whom?

Heather--

Here is my suggestion for numbers of sight words in kindergarten:
http://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/sight-words-for-kindergarten-yes-but-not-too-many#sthash.moNEgjnm.dpbs

thanks.

tim

This is really interesting on so many levels, and you've given me a lot to think about. I'm wondering what the relationship is between visualizing just in your head vs. on paper. My third graders really enjoy listening to a passage where I stop to allow them to draw and label. My favorite example is having them draw the inventing room in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is so rich with sensory detail and action verbs. By using these terms to label, it allows me to introduce the importance of including these elements in their own story writing. Sometimes they draw on their white boards--fast and fleeting--and sometimes they draw slowly and meticulously with paper and color and create, in some cases, impressive illustrations. There's a technique in The Reading Strategies Book called 'Reread and Sketch with More Detail' which combines drawing and labeling with rereading so that students see what they may have missed the first time through. Thanks for raising this issue.

Hi Dr. Shanahan,

What you have explained about visualization and the differences across grade levels when teaching this strategy is very interesting. Would you recommend teaching visualization to1st and 2nd graders with an interactive read aloud lesson?

Lynn
Given that young children naturally visualize when stories are read to them and that beginning reading texts are so heavily illustrated, I would simply not introduce this strategy at all until the kids were a bit older.
Thanks
Tim

Thank you for your response. What you say makes a lot of sense!

Lynn

Dear Dr. Shanahan,
This is thought provoking. I am basically thinking about English Language Learners in a non-native English Speaking community. These students usually have little to no exposure to English; as their communities mainly use the native language for daily communication. Such students may not connect with or even have any mental representation of what is read to them; that is, if they were lucky enough to get fluent models to read to them.

Dr. Shanahan, do you think that teachers to such students should even consider trying out this strategy?
Thank you.

Very thoughtful piece—thank you. I’m wondering about mental representations for Braille readers with low vision or blindness. Surely they learn to read, but I would imagine that visualization is either not there or different and that other modes (auditory, touch) might come into play?

Mabel--
My focus with second language students would be much more on language than on strategies like visualization. For example, using pictures to illustrate vocabulary has proven to be particularly effective with ELs. In other words, instead of trying to get them to imagine (to visualize in their minds), I would focus on trying to connect the language with the concrete and truly visualized (that is visualized with their eyes rather than their minds).
Good luck.

tim

Lara-
Clearly, blind students cannot visualize (at least if they are congenitally blind). That may be part of why those students struggle so much with comprehension. However, as my piece makes clear (I hope) visualization is more than just a visual strategy -- it also includes the other sensory systems (sound, smell, touch, taste)... the blind is capable of rendering their memories into those forms as well. Interpreting text is partly verbal and partly sensory.
There is a physician who claims that there is a condition in which people (whose sensory mechanisms are intact) cannot visualize at all. That hasn't been proven -- and to my knowledge hasn't captured much scientific evidence -- but it is certainly possible that the blind aren't the only ones lacking this ability to see things in their mind.

thanks.

tim

You mentioned that certain reading strategies have been proven to be effective. Visualization has moderate gains when paired with the teaching of text structure. From your research what are the reading strategies that have been proven to help increase children's comprehension?

Kamilah--

The following all have multiple studies showing sizable improvements in reading: summarization, self questioning, text structure, monitoring, inferencing/cohesion linking.

tim

This is such a great finding. I teach reading comprehension (grades 1-2) to grad students and just told the dean that I wanted to take visualization out of my presentations...thanks for the science and clear explanation!

What are the nuts and bolts of teaching visualisation? Is it just drawing conscious attention to visual images that are arising spontaneously as students read or listen to text, fleshing them out and actively adding detail? How would we know if it’s working? Does it always rely on drawing? I’m not sure I could draw what I visualise when I’m reading. And equally, how would I know that I have added anything to what the students can already do?

For ELs, there is a great visualization technique that helps with language acquisition. It’s called Picture dictation and there are different ways to do it. I select a descriptive passage of a certain number of words that contains a linguistic construction that needs repetition and and practice. I then give art supplies and read the entire portion over and over again. Students recreate what they hear and then compare and discuss. There are many descriptions of this technique on the web.

Thank you for sharing the research. I'd like to support the ideas shared by Harriet and Mabel with my own anecdotal observations. In my work with schools in many parts of the country, teachers have found great success using the strategy of sketch-noting to support both comprehension and the ability to retell or summarize a text with their ELL and K-3 students. I suggest providing a structure for using sketchnotes, such as a graphic organizer with open boxes for sequencing key events, When reading aloud, the teacher stops to give time for students to draw and label something to help them remember each part. Teachers might also brainstorm a few key words to use as labels at each stopping point which has been found to be especially helpful to ELLs.. With silent reading, texts can be "chunked" with an open box after sections that present multisensory images, with a prompt such as, "what can you picture in you mind right now?" Stopping to make a quick sketch allows students one more way to make connections and personalize their understanding what's been read.

Although we don’t teach visualization directly as a strategy for the younger elementary students, we still teach it. When we use the illustrations in a story to discuss what is happening during parts of a story, we are modeling the use of pictures to create understanding. We ask students to visualize as soon as we ask them to draw a picture of their favorite part of a story. We ask them to visualize when they draw a picture of their own choosing and then ask them to tell or write about the picture. It’s just more concrete (actually motor and verbal enhanced) in the beginning, as appropriate for the development of that age group.
The thing that concerns me is when a reading comprehension program strongly teaches visualization. There’s no right or wrong way to visualize and I get concerned that teachers will evaluate students on whether they visualized “correctly.” If you gave Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and James Cameron the same book to make a movie out of, I bet each one would visualize a totally different movie. When we walk out of a movie and say, “I liked the book better,” it’s because we visualized it differently. We were the directors of our own movie. We need to keep this in mind when we teach visualization strategies.

I teach high schoolers strategies for improving their reading comprehension. I have been using Jason Reynolds’ “Long Way Down” graphic novel with them. It’s a great story which speaks to my students and the illustrations are beyond wonderful. We’ll move into other works (non graphic novels) as the year progresses.

A program that teaches visualization explicitly is Visualize-Verbalize. It works wonders!

Hi Tim
You say “Visualization was also one of the comprehension strategies that was found to improve reading comprehension. The average effect sizes were not as high as for some of the other strategies evaluated”.
Can you please point me to the study or studies you refer to that relate to strategy evaluation?

Karin--
The instruction for this varies greatly. For example, in some studies they do little more than tell kids to try to "draw a picture in their mind." The most effective is a more thorough kind of encouragement, getting kids to picture very specific aspects of the text that require them to make a careful inventory of the information (character, setting, specific events that represent the problem and solution). I'm not thrilled with the idea of using picture drawing for this as it slows things down too much, is cumbersome, and even someone with good visualization skills may have real problems translating that to a sketch (which would distract from their thinking about the text--which is the whole point).

tim

Emma-
See my response to Karin. It provides some description of teaching visualization. Remember the point is to get kids to code information from the text into memory, not to end up with a sketch on paper.

good luck.

tim

Emma-
See my response to Karin. It provides some description of teaching visualization. Remember the point is to get kids to code information from the text into memory, not to end up with a sketch on paper.

good luck.

tim

How would you do visual learning for reading a story as a teacher for young toddlers? Are there other ways besides using objects or pictures?

Leah--
The research that I have read suggests that kids engage in this pretty automatically. Definitely we should read to young children and most books aimed at children at those early ages are heavily illustrated. Reading such books and talking to your children about them (including the pictures) is about all you need to do. For instance, you may read, "Daddy drove the truck." and this line is accompanied by a picture of a truck and a man driving it and other things (like a stop sign or fire hydrant or a girl riding a bike on the sidewalk. The parent reads that line and maybe says, "What did daddy drive?" The child responds, "Truck." Where is the truck? and he/she touches the page. And, where is Daddy and the child touches the page. And there is a girl in that picture, too, what is she doing? and so on.

tim

Very interesting post. Is it the age or stage that determines how well the student can visualise?

You mentioned for example that grade 1-2 students cannot visualise so well but what if it was a strong reader in grade 2? If they can already decode very well and have good language comprehension and background knowledge, are they likely to be able to visualise well?

Mat--

I don't know. The neurological research shows those patterns. Any explanations of why included above were my inferences rather than to the research findings themselves. One possibility is that mastering decoding frees up those cognitive resources and allows the readers to devote their visualization to reading comprehension. Another is that this is a developmental phenomenon and that even older readers who struggle with decoding visualize. I know of no data that sorts that out. Sorry.

tim

Thanks for another great blog! Here's my question -- when I try to teach visualization to students, I've had success with asking the students to draw their thoughts about what they've read hoping to move a concrete visual to their minds in order to improve mental visualization skills. What are your thoughts about that?

Also, I have done visualization activities with kindergarten students where I read parts of a story, then pause and ask the students to draw what they have heard. I use this as a form of comprehension assessment. I've had success with this. I'm wondering your thoughts on this idea.

Tamara--
With young children there are many options for responding to text to demonstrate comprehension. Certainly one would be to allow them to draw pictures that summarize the text or that answer a particular question. For that, I would encourage you to have the students draw the picture and then have them describe/discuss their response. Research also shows that in K-1, another effective way to respond is to have children act out the story, etc.

Tim

Thank you so much for this information! I value your knowledge so much. As a district LETRS trainer, I struggle with some of the information included in the manuals. For example, in Vol 2 the authors address visualization as a "go to" strategy for comprehension. I cannot teach that to our staff as it is not a completely accurate picture of what they need to know. I find myself diverging from their blanket statements so that our teachers receive accurate information. Thank you for providing information that allows me to train teachers.

Jeri--
Yes, some of that content is a bit in the weeds. It isn't necessary to know either from the teacher or the student's point of view. Studies show that instruction is more affected by professional development when it is focused on classroom practice (not necessarily separate from theory and content, but also not overwhelmed by it).

tim

I find what you had to say quite interesting... as usual! "This situation model is just a mental representation of the text, and it includes both linguistic info from the text and the reader’s own prior knowledge." That makes a LOT of sense. It would make sense that younger students who are on the progressive path of phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and fluency, are developing synapse connections and neural pathways that are building a foundation of knowledge to be able to refer back to as visualization in 3rd grade and beyond as they encounter more complex texts. If they do not have a strong foundation in any one of those areas, I'm assuming that their mental or visual connections will either produce false information or that there will be a lack of being able to create any connections with the text. For a while, I thought that visualization was solely about seeing pictures in your head, like a movie screen. This involved imagination. I even encouraged imagination activities with my pre-k students. I would play epic music and tell them a made-up story that went with the music. I had no pictures and the story wasn't in song-form. After hearing the story with the music several times, they began to tell the story with the music on their own and act it out. I was hoping that being able to imagine and create pictures in their head would help with comprehension in the future as they progressed in their reading skills. However, the situation model you spoke about seems to have more to do with connecting text with prior knowledge and all of the visuals and experiences you had until that point. I'm assuming that in this scenario your brain is synthesizing these into a visual and even a sensory-filled mental experience that allows you to connect more deeply with the text. I know how important it is to provide visuals for young learners, English language learners, and students with mental or learning disabilities. However, what benefits that can be directly applied to reading by encouraging imaginative activities that do not use visuals. After all, imagination is a huge part of ECE.