Dual-Coding Theory: Is it still seen?

By: David M. Lewis, PharmD

PGY-1 Pharmacy Practice Resident

Shady Grove Medical Center

What is Dual-coding Theory1,2

In 1971 and in 1986, Allan Paivio developed the theory of dual coding. This was a way to explain an aspect of human cognition. It was the idea that a person’s recall and recognition was enhanced by the use of nonverbal and verbal information together. It is essentially the theory that there are two separate pathways for translating or “coding” information into memory, one verbal and one visual, and that these are connected yet operating independently. An example would be if someone were to show a picture of a bike and on the picture there was the word “bike” and this would be accompanied by someone verbalizing that the image was a bike. This would all be done at once and the idea was that the person would have better memory of the image that was shown in a future point in time. The theory expects essentially increase memory capacity that all learners would see benefit if visual information is layered over linguistic information that is completely verbal.

Is Dual-coding an effective learning style?2,3

Some studies dating back to the 1980’s, there has been efforts to try and explain the best way for a person to learn and retain information. Two of the many ways to learn included dual-coding and the learning styles hypothesis. The dual-coding learning style, like described above, is the idea that a person’s recall and recognition was enhanced by the use of nonverbal and verbal information together. However, the learning styles hypothesis suggests that all people have a certain style through which they prefer to process information. If people are presented certain preferred process, then learning could be improved in some way. This theory suggests that a learner’s preference should be considered by educators and if the they match the form of instruction to the learner’s preferred “learning style”, then the learner will retain more information or will learn at an increased rate.

In a recent study of 204 university students, the study tested these two cognitive models, the learning styles hypothesis and dual-coding, which make contradictory predictions about how learners process and retain visual and auditory information. In this study, it showed that students in the visual condition considerably outperformed those in the auditory condition regardless of learning style. Therefore, the results regarding dual-coding were clear, and the initial predictions were confirmed that participants of the study would perform better in the visual condition regardless of learning style. When learners were asked to process both visual (nonverbal) and linguistic (verbal) information simultaneously, they retained substantially more information, twice as much, as those who were prompted to focus only on auditory/linguistic information.

Perspective

Being someone that grew up with the idea of the learning styles hypothesis was the best way to learn, I was unaware of the dual-coding theory. Looking back on my education, I realized that dual-coding was more integrated into my education than originally may have thought. In addition, I realized that I prefer the ideas dual-coding learning and it actually allowed me to better retain information. Looking at the bigger picture in regards to teaching in general, we may not necessarily use photos directly in hand, but

we tend to use technology to aid in education and inadvertently end up using the dual-coding theory. The evolution of dual-coding theory is quite evident. Educators today could be using dual-coding through the multimedia applications in their classrooms. These multimedia applications make use of text, image, audio and video at the same time in correlation with teaching methods of verbal presentation of information.

As someone that is going through this teaching certificate program and we talk about the best to know your students; the best way to approach learning; and the many different ways of teaching. I feel that dual-coding is something I would want to integrate into my teaching style. Would I embrace it as my only teaching style? I don’t think that would be fair and it would be setting students up for potentially failure. Dual-coding is great for retaining or in other words memorizing information. However, as a clinician there isn’t one correct answer for a certain disease state because there are always different patient factors that would guide a person to a different solution. I think dual-coding should be integrated more into teaching because dual-coding is great in “theory”, but not necessarily the best theory.

References

1. Clark JM, Paivio A. Dual Coding Theory and Education. Educational Psychology Review. 1991;(3)3:149-210.

2. Questia. Dual-Coding Theory. https://www.questia.com/library/education/educational-psychology/learning-styles-and-theories/dual-coding-theory. (Accessed 2018 Sept 22).

3. Cuevas J, Dawson BL. A test of two alternative cognitive processing models: Learning styles and dual coding. Theory and Research in Education. 2018, Vol. 16(1) 40–64.