In 2018, Ryan Schaaf wrote Part 5 of a series on digital learners, arguing that students raised on screens process pictures, sound and video before text, and offering YouTube and Audio Bytes as strategies. The section below, added in 2026, checks one claim in the article against its sources and summarizes what multimedia research says about visual media in teaching.
Part 5: Digital learners process pictures, sounds, color and video before textby Ryan L. Schaaf
Based on the award-winning book, Reinventing Learning for the Always-On Generation: Strategies and Apps That Work, this 12-part article series will provide a comprehensive profile of nine core learning attributes of digital learners, and the core teaching, learning, and assessment strategies that can be used to appeal to their digital lifestyle and learning preferences. Readers will gain a clear understanding of various research-based strategies to optimize learning for the digital generation in the new digital landscape.
Part 5: Attribute #3: Digital learners prefer processing pictures, sounds, color and video before they process text.
“Learning in the classroom where a textbook is the only resource is like looking at a travel brochure and calling it a vacation.”
— Justin Tarte (Teacher, Tech Enthusiast)
For generations, graphics were generally static illustrations, photos or diagrams that accompanied the text and provided further clarification after the fact. Most of us can remember reading a paper-based Encyclopedia Britannica or a Webster’s Dictionary when we were younger. Back then, the primary information was provided by text, and the images were merely intended to complement the text. But for digital learners, the relationship is almost completely reversed. Increasingly, the role of text is to provide more detail to something that is first experienced as an image or a video.
Due in large parts to advances in and the prevalence of digital technologies and media, the digital generations have grown up in a remarkably visual world. Images have the ability to communicate meaning quickly. Burmark states (2002) that the eye processes images 60,000 times faster than the eye processes the content of text. From an early age, the digital generations have been regularly exposed to television, computers, tablets, videos, and digital games that put colorful, highly expressive, high-quality, realistic, multi-sensory experiences such as sight, sound, and touch -and in the near future smell, taste, and 3D – that contain little if any text. As a result, many of the digital generations prefer to process pictures, sounds, color, and video before they process text. It’s a natural conclusion that they prefer their media in the same way they use it at home.
Meanwhile, many people of the older generations continue to struggle trying to understand the fundamental differences between the visual generations and their own, because this is not the world the older generations were born into. Previous generations were paper-trained growing up. They were trained to communicate primarily with words. They were trained to communicate in a linear, logical, left-to-right, top-to-bottom, beginning-to-end manner. Meanwhile, the digital generations are light-and-sound trained, which is a completely different cognitive process than the one older generations use.
And the digital generations are not just consuming content; they are simultaneously creating it. They are transfluent – they are fluent in a wide range of media. And because they are transfluent, the digital generations find it much more natural than older generations do to begin communicating with visuals, and then to mix in text, color, sound and graphics in richly meaningful and creative ways. They are completely comfortable interacting across a wide range of platforms, tools and media.
What readers need to take away from this trend is that the digital generations are driving a clear and probably irreversible shift from written media to visual media. So increasingly for the digital generations, expressing ideas is just as likely to involve creating a simulation or digital mash-up as it would be for them to be writing an expository essay. They are evolving with their new technologies, so the digital generations will need to be able to communicate as effectively in graphical storytelling modes as older generations were taught to communicate with text.
There are many strategies that can access this learning attribute of the digital generations. First, identify a few powerful examples of visual media that represent the key concepts of the lesson. Identifying the right visual prompt will ensure that it stays in students’ minds for months or even years; which will serve as a powerful visual reference to help students recall key information.
Another strategy involving multimedia is Audio Bytes. Teachers and students can take a short video clip and remove or mute the audio. Independently or collaboratively, students can create their own narration based on the clip or content. Depending on the video clip, students can be guided to perform a wide variety of audio byte activities. In Science, teachers can mute the video of an animal show and have the students create their own Discovery or National Geographic documentary. In Reading, students can perform voice-overs of favorite stories such as The Three Little Pigs or The Twelve Labors of Hercules that were originally produced as plays or movies. Just about any video with educational content can be stripped of its audio content, allowing students to take an active role in learning the content of the video or writing personalized scripts for narration.
For additional strategies, please consider purchasing the award-winning book Reinventing Learning for the Always-On Generation: Strategies and Apps that Work. In our next installment of the series, we will explore the digital generations’ preference for processing pictures, sounds, color and video before they process text.
Read additional articles in the series
Reinventing Learning for the Always-On Generation – Part 1
Reinventing Learning for the Always-On Generation – Part 2
Reinventing Learning for the Always-On Generation – Part 3
Reinventing Learning for the Always-On Generation – Part 4
Ryan Schaff was one of hundreds of educators and experts to speak at FETC 2018 in January. Registration for the 2019 conference opens in June. Sign up for the FETC newsletter to be notified.
Visual media in teaching: what the research supports and what it does not
Visual media in teaching is the subject of Ryan Schaaf’s article above, which recommends choosing powerful visual examples, using video from sources such as YouTube, and having students narrate a muted clip. The strategies are sensible classroom practices, and there is a body of research on multimedia learning that can sharpen them. The same research also shows why one statistic in the article should not be repeated.
The 60,000 times claim
Schaaf’s article says that the eye processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and cites Burmark (2002). This figure circulates widely, and Alan Levine looked for its source in a 2012 post on the blog CogDogBlog. The most common citation found there was a 2001 3M presentation-tips document that attributes the figure to “findings from behavioral research” without naming a study. When Levine asked 3M, the company sent the same document. A 1986 study that had been suggested as the origin was, according to its lead author, unrelated to visual processing speed. Dennis Proffitt of the University of Virginia, whom Levine quotes, noted that identifying an animal in a natural scene takes about 150 milliseconds and that the text-versus-image comparison “does not make much sense.”
The sources opened for this section do not support the figure, so a teacher or presenter is better off leaving it out. The broader point in the article, that a well-chosen image or video can convey meaning quickly, does not depend on it.
What multimedia research supports
The most developed research is Richard Mayer’s multimedia learning program. Mayer’s essay The Future of Multimedia Learning (no publication year shown; its latest references are from 2022) reports 15 principles drawn from more than 200 experimental tests. Several bear directly on the strategies Schaaf describes:
- Words plus pictures work better than words alone (median effect size d = 1.35, positive in 13 of 13 tests). An effect size above 0.8 is conventionally considered large.
- Coherence: excluding extra material helps learning (d = 0.86). A clip with distracting extras can teach less than a shorter one.
- Signaling: cues that highlight the essential organization help (d = 0.69).
- Segmenting: learner-paced segments work better than a continuous lesson (d = 0.67).
- Pretraining: knowing key concepts beforehand helps (d = 0.78).
- Modality: narration with graphics works better than on-screen text with graphics (d = 1.00), and adding on-screen text to narrated graphics does not help (d = 0.10).
- Generative activity: guided activities during learning help (d = 0.71; 37 of 44 tests positive).
The essay also lists limits. The modality advantage is smaller or disappears when the lesson is slow or self-paced, the material is simple, or learners already know a lot. Some features, such as a speaker’s image on screen and fully immersive virtual reality, do not reliably help. Most of the research used typical learners, and Mayer states that the principles should be adapted to context and are not rigid rules.
Using these findings with video and Audio Bytes
Schaaf’s Audio Bytes activity, in which students mute a clip and write their own narration, resembles the generative activity principle, because students must organize and explain what they see. Teachers can apply the others when choosing and using YouTube clips: pick short clips that match one idea, cut or skip material that does not serve the lesson, tell students what to watch for, introduce key terms before the clip, and let students pause and replay. Decisions about captions for students who need them are separate from the redundancy finding, which concerns learners in the experiments.
One caution applies to the article’s premise. The sources opened here test how lessons should be designed for learners in general. They do not test whether a particular generation processes pictures, sound and video before text, so Schaaf’s description of what digital learners prefer rests on Schaaf’s own account and was not checked in this section. The practical advice, to use visual media with a clear instructional purpose, holds either way.
Further Reading
Editor’s note (2026): This event has taken place.
- Faculty Focus – Helping Students Develop Critical Information Processing Skills
- New York Times – Project Audio: Teaching Students How to Produce Their Own Podcasts
- EdTech Magazine – The Digital Citizenship Curriculum: Digital Literacy, Cyber Hygiene and More
Related reading
More on EdTech
