Using extended captions to improve learning from instructional illustrations

This article examines two strategies for improving the effectiveness of illustrations in text. Descriptive captions repeated the contents of illustrations verbally, whereas instructive captions focused learners’attention on salient features of illustrations without descriptive text. Contrary to much of the literature on pictures and prose, these illustrations provided information that did not overlap the main body of text. Two measures of learning outcomes were used: one which assessed learning from the illustrations alone and one that assessed learning from the verbal text alone. Results favoured the caption conditions over the illustration‐only condition. However, no additive effects of the captions were observed. In addition, the illustration plus descriptive caption condition outperformed the descriptive caption condition alone and the memory for accompanying text did not suffer from the presence of the illustrations or captions.