Adding elements to an existing image
I like the idea of marking up content. So do many people. We highlight our books and make notes in the margins. Tools such as Diigo allow us to highlight web pages created by others and ebook readers such as the Kindle allow us to highlight and annotate books we read on the screen. The Kindle even includes a feature that allows you to identify the content in a book you are reading that was most frequently highlighted by others. Marking up content has and continues to be a research topic with the most focus on text. The following have received considerable attention:
- Generative effect - the benefit to the self of manipulating content
- Signaling - benefit of having important information identified for you
Put a different way, we are claiming that there are benefits to learners in “marking up” learning materials and also to having a capable colleague mark up learning materials for them.
With text, there are benefits both to marking important ideas ourselves (highlighting, underlining) and having important or key concepts marked for us (bolded). These modifications would be examples of generative processing and signaling. Marking up images is less commonly addressed, but in some situations there are benefits to generating personal representations (e.g., Hall, Bailey & Tillman, 1997; Schwamborn, Mayer, Thillmann, Leopold & Leutner, 2010) and annotating instructional illustrations (Mayer, Steinhoff, Bower & Mars, 1995).
The benefits of content markup and storage can be framed in one additional way. Work on highlighting, underlining, and note-taking has often differentiated the potential benefits of the generative function from the value of external storage. External storage would come into play when students review their generated resources. Most of us would call the review of externally stored content “studying your notes” and most students likely assume this is the primary reason for taking the notes in the first place.
Researchers sometimes work by identifying the stages and the interrelationships among stages in important learning processes. In this case, the stage of information representation can be separated from the later stage of studying this representation. Students may exhibit a range of skills in executing each stage, but the first stage in this case typically places limits on the productivity of the second stage. The representation of content generated by the student is not always complete or accurate. If you examine the notes taken by several students, the range in what is recorded and the accuracy of the content can vary dramatically. The reasons for this variability are complex, but poor notes, especially notes that are inaccurate, make studying difficult.
So, we understand that some students do a poor job of creating representations of their learning experiences. We typically want students to make the attempt because of potential generative benefits, but what can be done to improve the inevitable challenge of learning from incomplete and inaccurate representations? One proposal has been to provide students with “expert” notes. In theory, such notes could be used to cross reference and improve the notes generated by the student. We say “in theory” because handing out a complete set of notes before or after presentations long seemed impractical. However, with the opportunities technology has provided in recent years, we no longer assume that access to “expert representations” is idealistic. At the college level, technology now makes it convenient to share resources (e.g., many college instructors share presentation slides, but actual notes would likely be more useful) or even to have students collaboratively generate study materials (e.g., a student wiki summarizing course content).
We provided this review of note taking and note using because it summarizes frequent and familiar learning experiences and because the extensive body of research focused in this area provides a way of thinking about learner activities and challenges that may generalize. External storage can involve more than text. As we indicated elsewhere, the example of a student being forced to sketch illustrations of laboratory specimens in biology laboratories is no longer the only way to generate a representation of laboratory experiences. Should the drawing skills of students and time required to generate this type of representation be limiting factors? A photograph taken with a cell phone would likely be of higher quality and students or the instructor might even share photographs as a way to improve study effectiveness by providing multiple examples. I remember for example that those of us dissecting a male cat were told that we should spend time with someone else in the class who happened by be dissecting a female cat. Obviously certain of the personal dissection experiences did not prepare us complete for all we were expected to know. Sharing was essential. Our focus on marking up such photographs argues that we can add useful information to photographs that make them more useful to the learner and to others who might share the images.