Reports from the National Assessment of Education Progress acknowledge that students’ reading skills have deteriorated in the past dozen years. This shouldn’t be too surprising given the way the internet and the iphone have changed the way we gather information.
Audiovisual instruction works around this deterioration of reading skills by changing the emphasis away from reading science lessons and toward viewing and listening to audiovisual science lessons. Fortunately, subjects like chemistry, biology, physics, and of course mathematics are best understood when students can see what’s being taught as it’s being taught. That, after all, is how the brain was designed in the first place, before reading was ever imagined.
The real strength of audiovisual instruction, though, is that what’s being taught is being stored in both the auditory and visual areas of the brain, making for easier retrieval.
Still another advantage of audiovisual instruction is that it relies heavily on graphs to explain and simplify topics.
The beauty of graphs is that they allow students to take the 2 units of measurement typically given in a problem, and measure one of the units along the graph’s X axis and the other along the Y axis. The slope of the graph line, including the angle of the graph line, and the area under the graph line immediately display 3 other important variables, which allows students to visualize all 5 variables and use them to calculate the solution to the problem.
Graphs relieve much of anxiety students suffer over having to remember mathematical formulas. Easing that burden helps overcome the mistaken belief that science is only for the “smart kids” in the class.