The Role of Visual Learning in Improving Students’ High-Order Thinking Skills

Abstract

Various concepts have been introduced to improve students’ analytical thinking skills based on problem based learning (PBL). This paper introduces a new concept to increase student’s analytical thinking skills based on a visual learning strategy. Such a strategy has three fundamental components: a teacher, a student, and a learning process. The role of the teacher includes monitoring the learning process by considering the most productive way to improve higher-order thinking (HOT) skills.Many studies show that students learn from courses that provide information in a visual format. We introduce a meaningful learning strategy for the classroom that promotes the presentation of information in visual formats such as images, diagrams, flowcharts and interactive simulations.  Furthermore, we compared visual and traditional learners based on their HOT skills, which were evaluated using the SWOT model. Performance analysis shows that visual leaning tools increased the students’ HOT skills.

Keywords: visual learning, PBL, HOT skills