Text, images and diagrams as information providers

We studied the effect of adjunct displays on recall in an expository text (based on McCrudden, Schraw, Lehman, & Poliquin, 2007) in order to find out which means of display aided pupils in the last years of secondary school to recall information. We included four conditions in the experiment: text only, text and causal diagram, text and images and causal diagram only. Participants were checked for their recall of main ideas and causal sequences. Recall for main ideas did not vary significantly across conditions. Contrary to McCrudden et al. (2007), our results for the causal sequences revealed that participants who studied a causal diagram only could recall more steps from causal sequences than participants in any of the other conditions. We will interpret the findings in the light of the literature on redundancy effects, dual coding theory, and the causal explication hypothesis.