An eye-tracking study of learning from science text with concrete and abstract illustrations.

This study investigated both the online process of reading, and offline learning from an illustrated science text. We examined the effects of using a concrete or abstract picture to illustrate a text and adopted eye-tracking methodology to trace text and picture processing. Fifty-nine 11th graders were randomly assigned to three reading conditions: text only, text with a concrete illustration, and text with an abstract illustration in a pretest, immediate, and delayed posttest design. Results showed that the text illustrated by either the concrete or the abstract picture led to better learning than the text alone. Eye-fixation data revealed that the abstract illustration promoted more efficient processing of the text. Analyses of the gaze shifts between the two types of external representation indicated that the readers of the text with the abstract illustration made a greater effort to integrate verbal and pictorial information. Furthermore, relations between online and offline measures emerged.