Not only what you see but where and when you see it: Factors influencing learning with visualizations

Visualizations can be seen throughout educational materials, such that their presence is almost ubiquitous. The assumption is that including visualizations in lessons will lead to greater learning. In this paper, I review the psychological and educational literature too examine how the presence of visualizations influences learning in STEM fields. In particular, I examine how the effectiveness of a visualization depends on characteristics of the visualization, learner and context. Characteristics of the visualization are important in so far as they highlight relevant information and reduce extraneous details. Learner characteristics influence how people learn with visualizations, but more work is needed in order to isolate these relations. And characteristics of the context are a critical but underexplored area in multimedia learning. Then, I propose some avenues for future work that focus on how to strengthen our understanding of which individual differences influence learning with visualizations, deepen our understanding of how the social context influences learning, and bride the research on instructor-provided and student-generated visualizations.