Illustrations or graphs: Some students benefit from one over the other

We examine whether there are differences between students regarding the utility of learning from visual representations (illustrations or graphs) within the context of a typed natural language-based conceptual physics tutoring system. Showing half of the students only illustrations and the other half only graphs, we found that novices benefited from illustrations, whereas non-novices showed no difference. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg