Neetin Agrawal is Senior Vice President, Knowledge at Toppr. He is an IIT Madras alumnus, having completed his B.Tech in Electronics in 2006. Altogether, he holds a decade-long experience in teaching young learners. He has mentored multiple top-100 rankers in JEE Advanced/ IIT-JEE. Neetin was a Professor of Physics at leading institutions in Kota including Bansal Class and Vibrant Academy for nearly 6 years. Subsequently, he founded an edtech company Dronstudy in 2015. More than 1.5 million students have benefited from DronStudy across platforms. Besides his active role as a teacher, Mr. Agrawal has authored 3 popular books on IIT-JEE Physics. He also loves to share his thoughts on education through articles and authored pieces.
Visual aids help students remember information effectively and retrieve them easily. This is because our brain works more like an image processor. A Cuban study showed that 1% of what we learn is from the sense of taste, 1.5% is from the sense of touch. Similarly, 3.5% of learning is from the sense of smell, 11% from hearing, but a whopping 83% of what we learn is from the sense of sight! Clearly, a major portion of what we learn is through the visual mode. Understanding the power of visual learning, EdTech companies leverage visual aids to help students grasp tough concepts easily.
They are instructional devices that represent information visually. They help connect different ideas together, break down large concepts into small easily comprehensible bits, and make the information easy to consume. Examples of visual aids include posters, infographics, presentations, flow charts, mindmaps, and animated videos. Here are a few ways in which visual aids can be applied in academics for a better conceptual grasp:
- Mindmaps: These make it easier to get the “whole picture”. For instance, a chapter is divided into many topics and sub-topics. Each topic further has several concepts stitched in. A mindmap of a chapter gives a visual representation of the entire chapter and its offshoots (topics, sub-topics and concepts). Using connectors, a mindmap helps students understand which concepts are interconnected. This way of representing massive information through a visual mindmap makes it easier for students to retain information and categorize it in their memory.
- Infographics: Infographics are widely used in articles, blogs, and books. When it comes to academics, infographics can help make concepts easy to process. For instance, formulae, important laws, biochemical reactions, chemical pathways, etc. can be represented through infographics. They are especially helpful to represent and memorize data-intensive concepts.
- Animated videos: Interactive and animated videos are especially helpful in learning process-based concepts. For example, students learn processes like photosynthesis, working of a voltaic cell, or the structure of a nuclear reactor when they see the process visually through animated videos.
Research suggests that visual aids stimulate thinking and increase interest in the learning material. When visual aids are used in a classroom, students experience a pleasant learning experience. They help students retain information effectively and recall it with ease later on. They also make it easier for teachers to explain concepts.
Toppr answr also leverages the power of visual aids to make learning better with detailed mindmaps for chapters, cheatsheets for important concepts, and formulae sheets.