Building Knowledge with Dual Coding

Most of us have experienced death by PowerPoint at some time in our lives. You might remember how much time the presentation wasted or just how insipid the overall experience was, but can you remember what it was all about? Of course not. So why do some teachers continue to deliver lessons in this way? We’ve all heard that we need to keep the text to a minimum on visual aids, use larger fonts and some pictures, but what else can be done to benefit the learning of your students? Oliver Caviglioli the author of Dual Coding With Teachers shares some tips on how educators can design visual aids to support the learning of their pupils.
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When I transitioned from teaching in a local comprehensive to a special school, the clarity and directness of the visual explanations used in the special school became immediately apparent. Throughout my childhood, my architect father would deliver daily sermons on the principles of design and demonstrated how sketching could play a powerful role in problem-solving. It was at the special school where I applied this knowledge and began experimenting with visual designs to engage my pupils. Later, in the 1990s, I discovered that I had actually been putting Allan Paivio’s theory of dual coding to practice all along.

What is dual coding?
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Dual coding can be traced back to two stories. The most well-known dual coding story dates back to Allan Paivio’s research from the early 1970s. This involves combining a word and an image to form a single unit of meaning. As images and words are processed separately in their distinct channels, this makes for what Professor Paul Kirschner calls double-barrelled learning. The double encoding that happens through this tethering of word and image, leaves a double memory trace and, consequently, offers double the chance of being retrieved. What is less well known is that Paivio’s experimental subjects were dealing with very simple words, with no conceptual challenge at all. So, for the encoding and memorisation of simple content, this story of dual coding is useful but hardly has great significance when dealing with the cognitive challenge that represents teachers’ everyday work in classrooms.

The second less well-known dual coding story with far more educational significance is related to his later work — particularly Mental Representations, 1990 — he writes about the differences in structure and consequent processing of verbal and visual information. While he did not do any research into this in the same way as in his earlier work, he considered it significant. Its significance was explored a few years before by Larkin and Simon in 1987. They established what they termed The Visual Argument based on their findings that well-formed diagrams were more cognitively efficient than text alone. In their experiments, subjects given such a diagram were more rapid and accurate in finding answers to comprehension questions than those presented only with text.

​The lessons to be drawn from both stories is that the earlier story is about the visual capacity, while the second story is about the visuospatial capacity. Processing text, with its linear structure, places more challenge than the non-linear arrangements of diagrams on the subjects’ cognitive resources. As philosopher, Bertrand Russell, pointed out in the 1930s, a diagram, its elements and their relationships are immediately and explicitly available to the viewer. In the parallel situation of the same information being articulated in text alone, the necessary complexity of the syntax involved inevitably increases the difficulty of comprehension. Thus, the findings a half century later of Larkin and Simon in 1987 as mentioned above.

Why do teachers need to know about dual coding?

Even if teachers never use dual coding in their classrooms, they can benefit enormously from learning about it because through the theory they can better understand the significance of the role of schema in teaching and learning. As the term schema is currently being revived in teachers’ lexicon, it seems crucial that we start to investigate its structure and processes. Studying dual coding — in the sense of story number 2 — does this very effectively.

Teachers can use dual coding initially in revealing their schema of the topic under question when introducing and explaining it to their students. That way, students have the fleeting and vanishing words of their teacher (the transient information effect, in the context of cognitive load theory). Then through a process I have termed Recount and Recall, students can study and reproduce the graphic organiser in such a way that results in perfect or near-perfect recall. For details of this process, see my forthcoming book with Tom Sherrington, Teaching WalkThrus: five-step guides to Instructional Coaching.
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Equally, at a later stage, teachers can give their students a partially completed graphic organiser, in which the missing parts can be filled in with a multiple choice style format with an array of plausible options below the visual.
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Free dual coding resources

My website — www.olicav.com — has 16 sections that cover topics such as posters, powerpoint, graphic organisers, diagrams, course modules, walkthrus, sketch notes, portraits, quotes, icons, illustrations, videos and podcasts. Most of the resources are freely available to download, subject to a Creative Commons agreement.

I currently present on different aspects of dual coding at international, national and regional researchED events. I lead training sessions in schools and colleges, and have recently collaborated with Tom Sherrington to produce Teaching WalkThrus: five-step guides to instructional coaching, a practical guide on 50 teaching techniques that convert Rosenshine’s principles of instruction into daily practice. The publication will be released next month.
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You can follow what Oliver is up to on twitter @olicav