A Study On The Relationship Between The Illustration Of Teaching Materials And The Development Of Students' Learning Ability

Illustrations are an important part of modern textbooks, and materials with high-quality illustrations make them more spiritual and vibrant. After the Basic Education Curriculum Reform, domestic textbooks began to pay attention to the quality and quantity of textbook illustrations. Therefore the number of illustrations was significantly increasing and the color changed from black and white to colorful and so on. Researchers have turned their attention to the researches on textbook illustrations, focusing on the classification, characteristics and application of textbook illustrations over the last10years. Moreover the High School Biology Curriculum Standard laid emphasis on the edition of the textbooks with illustrations, which illustrated the importance of illustrations for textbooks. However, some teachers paid less attention to the graphs during practical teaching activities. In September2012, I went to ShiYan Public School which located in Bao’an District, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province and began the one-semester educational practice. According to the classroom observation set by myself during the internships, I found that some teachers tend to focus on words while ignoring the textbook illustrations. Moreover, LU Yang’s survey showed that68%of teachers believed that the illustrations did no help on students’learning. ZHANG Yun-sheng’s survey showed that80%of students considered teachers’interpretation on the illustrations ineffective. These issues above are worthy of reflection. In this connection, I started to ponder the reason why teachers emphasis on text but the illustrations, and look for the function of the textbook illustrations for students’learning.Regarding the issues above, I first conducted theoretical analysis. For the reference searching in CNKI, I used the keyword "text illustration" as the target title and finally obtained totally511related papers published in the last thirty years. For the data searching in Springer Link, I used the keyword "Illustrations" as target title and finally got total598related papers focusing on the illustration observation. The research method of this paper is analyzing the relationship between the illustrations observation and the development of the students’learning ability through extensive literatures study in order to develop a profound understanding of the educational value on textbook illustrations and searching for the ways to improve students’learning ability via the illustrations observation. Last but not the least, this article looked for the rational teaching strategies for the teacher in order to make good use of graphs.This paper adopt theoretical analysis using the methods of learning theory, cognitive science theory and brain science theory and found that textbook illustrations observation was the basis for learning capacity development, particularly in:(1)Observation could improve the aesthesis, memory and thinking which belonged to the internal mental activity.(2)Observation could promote the overall development of students’ learning ability. As a consequence, teachers could arrange a reasonable set of activities for observation to promote the development of students’ learning ability. Textbook illustrations, as type static graph, were one of the simple and efficient curriculum resources. Classroom teaching could take good advantage of these illustrations for observation to promote the development of students’ observation, memory, thinking, and ultimately affect the development of students’ learning ability.For the curriculum of biology in high school, the educational value of textbook illustrations owned its subject-specific discipline. It was reflected in the High School Curriculum Standards of biology that the primary goal of biology was to learn to observe objectively, thereby proposing biological questions available for exploring. In addition, as one of the science textbooks, the number of the illustrations in biology textbooks was more than those in liberal arts textbooks. And the things involved in the illustrations were basically located at microscopic level. For example, the number of illustrations that were at the microscopic level reached82, accounting for56%of the illustrations in the textbook for high school students named "Molecular and Cellular" which published by the People’s Education Press.These illustrations were so vivid and useful that they could deliver beyond the limitations of sense, time and space and highlight the microscopic characteristics, features or phenomena of biological knowledge. So these illustrations provided rational emotional materials for the establishment of rational understanding, as well as provided possibility for the development of rational knowledge. Through the observation of illustrations in biology textbooks, students could better recognize the phenomenon of life and understand life sciences. Educators should take curriculum standards as basis and recognize the close relationship between the illustration observation and the development of students’ learning ability. We should also take advantage of the resources of these textbook illustrations and seek reasonable teaching strategies to effectively improve students’ learning ability.The teaching strategies for improving students’ learning ability through the observation of instructional illustrations should consist of the following three parts. The observation objectives should be determined around the instructional objectives. The observation of graphic-texture association should be considered as the fundamental form of observation for instructional illustrations and it also should be guided with formative evaluation. Appropriate and correct teaching strategies would make it more scientific and effective for students observing the instructional illustrations.