Picture is worth 1000 words: Developing students’ visual communication skills by creating information sheets

STEM teaching can be seen as didactic with the lecturer passing key facts onto the students who memorize and repeat these exactly when assessed. Facts can be presented as text, numbers, diagrams, or multi-layered visuals (Walsh & Ross, 2015; Martin & Gaffney, 2016). To ensure that our first-year medical sciences module teaching is not didactic, and students are actively developing their critical thinking and analytical skills (Bobek & Tversky, 2016) we created a unique information sheet assessment. Information sheets are a concise scientific message on a specific aspect of a currently important health-related topic. These use simple layout, limited text, and a set of clear visuals to explain to the general public facts based on research from multiple sources (Frankel, 2020).

Students are allocated in small groups and given training about information sheets along with the related principles of basic visual design. Student groups then create an information sheet on a topic of medical importance of their choice. Part of the submission is an explanation of reasoning about the group’s choice of data from related research, and copyright free visuals presented in their information sheet (Cook et al, 2015). Additionally, group members peer-mark each other’s contribution to their information sheet prior to instructors marking.

After the pilot in 2019 we have expanded the provided training by adding a session on successful group work and have further developed the related independent learning resources. During the last two years for many students access to quiet study time and common group working spaces has been disrupted due to unplanned commitments outside of their study. These disruptions due to the CoVid-19 pandemic have prevented us from formally evaluating the impact of this teaching strategy in previous years.

Based on our past experience and students’ informal self-reporting this task results in an easier image analysis process as part of their studies, and in an increased use of visual exam revision techniques. Thus, an immediate benefit for students is the development or enhancement of their visual learning skills and revision strategies. We hope that as long-term benefits this teaching strategy will improve students’ skills in relation to analysis, critical reasoning, and group work. All of these benefits are crucial in the enhancement of a student’s employability in an everchanging and highly competitive job market.

The impact of this teaching strategy will be evaluated through a questionnaire after the completion of the information sheet task in April. We will use both open and closed questions to assess the impact on students’ engagement with available scientific images and their ability to create scientific images for their own studies.
Questionnaire data will be used to explore the benefits of this teaching strategy in developing students’ engagement with scientific images as part of their formal and independent study practices. We will also discuss the possibility of transferring this teaching strategy to other STEM disciplines.