Effects of mental visualizations in science text comprehension

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The purpose of the study is to test whether students better understand a scientific text when they are asked to generate mental visualizations. A second purpose is to test whether self-generated visualizations can be improved by instructional support. The planned study is based on a between-subjects design with four different levels of instruction (no visualization, visualization, visualization with support of the construction process, visualization with support of the reviewing process). To help students to construct mental visualizations, students are provided with external pictures before reading a text paragraph. To help students to review their mental visualizations, they are provided with external pictures after they have read the paragraph. We expect students who are asked to visualize text content to better recall the text than those students who are not asked to visualize text content (Paivio, 1986). Furthermore, we expect students who are provided with external pictures to better understand the text than those who are not provided with external pictures. The reason is that we expect them to generate more accurate mental visualizations than the other students.