ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries C&RL News ■ February 2002 / 95 C o l l e g e & R e s e a r c h L i b r a r i e s news Modeling and the use of graphics in Web tutorials A lesson from social learning theory by Doug Suarez H ow do we create effective learning en­vironments for our students to help them learn how to use library resources? And how do we do this so they retain these skills for use throughout their lives? One poten­ tially useful explanation that can help us plan and ex e cu te our li­ brary Web in s tru c­ tional tutorials comes from the discipline of social psychology. Social learning theory Observational learn­ ing, or modeling, is a key component of so­ cial learning theory. P sy ch o lo g ist A lbert B a n d u ra 1 first pro­ posed that social learn­ ing theory could ex­ Figure 1. The w h ite w a te r rafting image implies dynamic team activity; it accompanies library instruction tutorials for the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences. plain p sy ch o lo g ical functioning in terms of a continuous recipro­ cal interaction between personal and envi­ ronmental determinants. His assumptions were that most behavior is learned by direct experience or by visual observation; that most behavior is learned, deliberately or inadvertently, through modeling; and that modeling can take the form o f observing others performing certain skills or learn­ ing by observing representations of desired skills. Modeling can significantly help re­ duce the trial and er­ ror of learning. T h e th e o ry in ­ volves four essential steps in the modeling process: • Attention. The most fundamental and obvious step in the learning p ro cess is p ay in g a tte n tio n . Physical discomforts such as sleep in ess, s ic k n e s s , o r b ein g tense and nervous are obvious examples of distractions, but there are others. If the ex­ amples used in your tutorial lessons are not attractive and do not grab your students’ attention, then they could be doing just the opposite of what you in­ tended. A ttention. The About the author Doug Suarez is applied health sciences referen ce librarian at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, e-mail: dsuarez@spartan.ac.brocku.ca mailto:dsuarez@spartan.ac.brocku.ca 9 6 / C&RL News ■ February 2002 Figure 2. Skydiving image is used throughout the tu to ria l fo r Com m unity Health Sciences D epa Applied Health Sciences. One good way to create attention is to use images in your tutorial that make inter­ esting metaphors. For example, on the li­ brary instruction Web pages created for teach­ ing support in the Faculty o f Applied Health Sciences departments at Brock University,2 the homepage prominently displays a large image o f white water rafting. The goal is to generate interest from students in the Physi­ cal Education, Recreation and Leisure Stud­ ies, and Community Health Sciences depart­ ments by presenting a dynamic team ath­ letic activity that implies the idea o f working together for common goals (figure 1). In practical terms, I would suggest that librarians designing Web pages use appro­ priate images as much as possible without compromising the page loading response time. The images should be colorful and dynamic so that they demand at­ tention and m otivate students to proceed to the individual tutorial lessons that follow. If the images are attrac­ tive, students will pay more attention to your message. Simply plac­ Figure 3. An example of the image used as a header in the exercise quiz that accompanies the generic tutorial for each of the three d e p a rtm e n ts in th e F a cu lty o f A p p lie d Health Sciences. r­ ing textual instructions on a page is not ad­ equate. • R eten tion . In o der to learn something new, we must be able to remember what we have paid attention to. We store the information we have observed in the form of mental images and verbal de­ scriptions. We can retrieve these images at a later date to solve a similar problem or re­ peat the learned behavior. When we create Web tutorials, we need to use images that reinforce our message in the best ways pos­ sible to help our students recall these tutorial images and thereby learn better. For example, in the Community Health Sci­ ences tutorial selected from the library research instruction pages cited above,3 I have used a library instruction s k y d iv in g g ra p h ic rtm ent, Faculty of throughout the tutorial. The intention is to pro­ vide a dynamic back­ ground image that implies group participa­ tion and cooperation in a controlled, but risky, environment. While not directly health related in the traditional sense, the graphic is memo­ rable and should help students identify with the people shown and, by association, the tutorial content (figure 2). • R ep ro d u ctio n . Without being able t reproduce the behaviors that are necessary to duplicate a newly learned skill or skill set, we have to allow for practice. Your tuto­ rials must provide direct practice exercises or support-specific course requirements that will reinforce these newly taught skills. Us­ ing images that remind students o f the skills they have just been taught will go a long way in this process. In the quizzes that are provided with the Web instruction pages cited ab ove, images have b e e n in co rp o ­ rated to highlight the intent of the exercises and to provide some humor to an otherwise pedestrian procedure’ (figure 3). •M o t i v a t i o n . Lastly, we need to mo­ tivate our students to imitate these new skills in som e m eaningful ways. How can we do this? Perhaps we can provide quizzes within the Web tutorials (that are preferably graded) or integrate the tuto­ rials into specific academic courses (whose requirements for term papers and exams in turn require mastery of those library skills we have been trying to teach). If your pages are well constructed with text and comple­ mentary images, and they are presented in an attractive and relevant manner, then (c o n tin u ed on p a g e 119) o