The Power of Image and Text Combined
As teachers, we’ve all seen it: the glazed look in a student’s eyes when they are met with a wall of text. According to Allan Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory, first developed in the 1970s and still widely cited in educational psychology today, our brains process information through two distinct channels: one verbal and one visual (or “nonverbal,” in Paivio’s original terminology).
These two channels do not compete with each other. They work in parallel. When a student reads a sentence, the verbal channel activates. When they look at an illustration, the visual channel activates. When both happen together, the brain creates two separate, interconnected memory traces for the same piece of information, rather than just one.
When we provide students with a resource that follows our Winning Formula (Illustration + a few lines of text), we are essentially giving them two “hooks” to hang the information on. If the student forgets the words, the image can often trigger recall. If they forget the image, the text can do the same. This redundancy is exactly what dual coding theory predicts will increase long-term retention, and it is one of the reasons illustrated teaching materials consistently outperform text-only handouts in classroom settings.
Reducing Extraneous Cognitive Load
Cognitive Load Theory, developed by educational psychologist John Sweller in the 1980s, tells us that working memory has a strict and very limited capacity. At any given moment, a student can only actively process a small number of new pieces of information before that memory becomes overwhelmed.
Sweller’s theory distinguishes three types of cognitive load. Intrinsic load comes from the inherent difficulty of the material itself, for example, understanding what the Electoral College does. Germane load is the productive mental effort that helps build long-term understanding. Extraneous load, on the other hand, is unnecessary mental effort caused by how information is presented rather than by the material itself.
A dense block of unbroken text creates exactly this kind of extraneous load for a struggling reader. The student’s working memory is consumed by the act of decoding individual words, sounding them out, holding them in mind, piecing together sentence structure, leaving very little capacity left over to actually understand the historical, scientific, or geographical concept the text was meant to teach.
By integrating visual scaffolding, illustrated educational resources directly reduce this extraneous load. The illustration provides immediate context before a single word is read, so the brain doesn’t have to build that context from scratch. This idea closely echoes Richard Mayer’s Multimedia Learning principle, which found that people learn more effectively from words and pictures combined than from words alone, provided the image and text are closely related and presented together rather than separately.
Pedagogical Deep Dive: Supporting Struggling Readers
For students in Grades 3-6 who are reading below grade level, a page of dense text can feel less like a learning opportunity and more like a wall they need to climb before they’re even allowed to learn. Our Thinking Coloring Pages are built to dismantle that wall.
By pairing a single, detailed illustration with a concise block of 5 to 7 lines of text, these resources offer a high-success entry point for readers of all levels. A struggling reader is not faced with three paragraphs to push through. They are faced with one clear image and a short, manageable passage they can realistically finish, succeed at, and feel proud of.
There is also a behavioral benefit that’s easy to overlook: the act of coloring itself. Coloring is slow by nature. It naturally creates what we might call “dwelling time,” the extra minutes a student spends sitting with a single page, a single illustration, a single concept, rather than rushing past it. That extended exposure gives the brain more opportunities to encode the accompanying information, reinforcing both the verbal and visual channels described by Paivio decades ago.
Reduce cognitive overwhelm in your classroom. Bring research-backed visual learning tools into your next lesson and see the difference in memory retention for yourself.
Sources:
Paivio, A. (1971). Imagery and Verbal Processes. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. — Foundational text introducing Dual Coding Theory.
Sweller, J. (1988). “Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning.” Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257-285. — Original formulation of Cognitive Load Theory.
Mayer, R. E. (2009). Multimedia Learning (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. — Research on the multimedia learning principle and the benefits of combining words and images.