Twenty-sixth International Conference on Learning

Abstract

How can educators use visual thinking strategies to teach writing and develop observation and inference skills for their students? This is an essential question in our image-rich digital world. Though the teaching of writing has a long textual history that uses text and verbal prompts to support and inspire students’ thinking and writing (Sperling, 2001), there are few studies investigating the use of images in place of verbal prompts. This paper will examine the effect of a curriculum intervention designed to teach students visual thinking strategies to improve their observation, inference writing skills in high school English classes. Visual thinking strategies are designed to support visual literacy, thinking, and communication skills using visual art in museums. The foundation for the strategies rest on three questions: What’s going on in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that? What more can we find? The results indicate that using visual thinking strategies for writing prompts has a positive effect on the quality of student writing and specifically their observation and inference skills.