"A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style, park your own car out front. My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with. Case in point, those darned Harry Potter movies. That was so not what that part-Veela-chick, Fleur Delacour, looked like.” - Karen Marie Moning
"Proficient readers spontaneously and purposely create mental images while and after they read. The images emerge from all five senses as well as the emotions and are anchored in a reader's prior knowledge."
- Keene and Zimmerman, Mosaic of Thought
Research shows that proficient readers create mental images spontaneously and purposefully during and after reading. These images help readers recall details and draw conclusions. Visualizing also helps students create nonlinguistic representations, or understandings, of concepts that do not involve words. Nonlinguistic representations are a powerful tool for learning and one of nine research-based strategies discussed in Classroom Instruction That Works, a 2001 book by Robert Marzano, Debra Pickering, and Jane Pollock.
Visualizing can be used before, during, and after reading. As with any comprehension strategy, be sure to model the thinking processes involved! It is also important to remind students that the effectiveness of the strategy does not depend on their artistic ability. As long as the images are meaningful to the student, they will enhance comprehension of the text in question.
Before Reading
- Have students preview and sort images from a text.
- “Picture walk” through a text and make predictions about the content, based on the images.
- Use Guided Imagery to prepare students for reading.
- Have students draw pictures to document prior knowledge. Compare these pictures in small groups, and use them as the basis for a whole-class discussion.
During Reading
- Ask students to explain how individual images support the main idea of the passage or book.
- Discuss the relationships between the images within a text.
- Have students sketch while listening to a read-aloud. Compare these pictures in small groups, and use them as the basis for a whole-class discussion.
Reading
- Have students make a drawing based on what they read. Compare this drawing to their prior knowledge.
- Complete Venn diagrams, charts, or grids based on the text.
~ content adapted from http://beyondpenguins.ehe.osu.edu/issue/icebergs-and-glaciers/visualizing-to-understand-content-area-text and licensed under Creative Commons.
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