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Abstract

Spanish

A study is reported that explored adolescents' and adults' abilities to comprehend and create visual displays (realistic pictures, graphics, diagrams) as effective means of communicating information. The comprehension abilities of our subjects were analysed through a test which included questions on six examples of different kinds of visual displays. Their production abilities were studied by examining the visual displays that the subjects spontaneously created on the content of a given text. An improvement with age was found in their comprehension abilities: older subjects performed better than younger ones in extracting more elaborated information from graphics. On the contrary, no remarkable improvement with age could be found in their production abilities. Subjects of all instructional groups showed difficulties in following conventional rules of representation with graphics and in using graphical features (colour, size, grid) to communicate information visually. The conclusion is drawn that instructional measures for improving subjects' visual literacy at different educational stages are needed.

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Adolescents' and adults' skills to visually communicate knowledge with graphics

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