A Couple of Posters Inspired By Oliver Caviglioli’s New Book

Last week, Oliver Caviglioli’s new book (Dual Coding with Teachers) arrived. It’s great.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years learning about cognitive science, problem solving and literacy in physics. More recently I’ve been thinking about the role visualisations play in learning (see some posts on bar models,  bar charts and other visualisations in physics).

Oliver’s book provides the theoretical underpinning I was looking for, plus advice on making visualisations effective.

At the weekend I made these two posters applying advice from the book:

and…

This weekend I intend to write a post on a paper Oliver recommends: Why a Diagram is (Sometimes) Worth Ten Thousand Words (Larkin and Simon 1987). I’ve read the paper, and it’s fascinating. The examples in the paper are mostly physics, but I think Oliver’s explanation of ‘computational efficiency’ (p27) is clear and more readily accessible. My post will re-apply the concept to physics.

Thanks for reading,

Ben