Visuals, like pictures, charts, diagrams, graphics, and the like, are widely used in education. However, there is little justification in the research literature for their use. The overall purpose of this exploratory study was to find out more about the processing of visuals or graphics in an educational task. Specifically, it was thought that prior knowledge of PERT (Critical Path Method) would facilitate the task of matching paragraphs to PERT networks. One group (prior knowledge) read a programed instruction (PI) text of PERT before going through a computer-assisted instruction (CAI) task. Another group (no prior knowledge) did the task before reading the text. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) did not show that knowledge of PERT helped performance. However, a group-by-sex ANOVA on proportion correct showed females performing better than males. Results were most valuable in pointing the way to further research dealing mainly with the meaningfulness of graphics or visuals. (JK)
