How does Elementary Students Understand Illustrations in Science Textbook ?

초등학생들은 과학 교과서에 나오는 삽화를 어떻게 이해하고 있을까?

The purpose of this study was to investigate elementary students' difficulties when they read the illustrations on scientific textbook. 5 illustrations were selected on basis that they had some of the textual/graphical features. The data were collected from open-ended questionnaires and follow-up interviews. To investigate difficulties of reading illustrations, 100 sixth grade students participated in this study and interviews were taken to 9 volunteers among those participants. The results showed that many students had difficulties in the integration of verbal representation and realistic image representation on the illustration, therefore they often misunderstood the meaning of illustration. These results gave several recommendations when we used illustrations as educational materials. Teachers would be better to guide that students could understand illustrations with the integration of the reading of one or more representations.