The city of Geneva is famous for being home to many international organizations, such as the World Health Organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the European headquarters of UNO. In addition, Switzerland itself has three large linguistic regions, speaking Swiss German, French or Italian. While the diversity of culture and language is a tremendous opportunity to broaden one’s perspective, it represents a challenge for education. Even in the same linguistic and cultural community, people come with various abilities and motivations that affect their capacity to learn from text and picture. This edition of this EARLI SIG 2 conference will welcome proposals on the topic of diversity: how learners with various cultural, linguistic, knowledge backgrounds, or diverse cognitive capacities comprehend text and picture instructions and how the design of text and picture instruction can facilitate or make it worse.

Please note that the central theme is meant to inspire submissions, but not limit their scope. All proposals that fit within the domains of the SIG are most welcome. Typical research topics that may be addressed include (but are not restricted to) the following:

• Theoretical considerations (review or empirical study) on how we construct meaning from text and graphic
• Learning from various types of external representations : verbal / visual / mixed formats, interactive or dynamic representations, presented or constructed by the learners, auditory/visual modality, etc.
• Individual differences when learning from text and picture instructions (see main topic of diversity)
• Methods for the study of learning from text and picture (e.g. tracing methods like eyetracking, online measures, learning analytics, etc.)
• Instructional methods to enhance text and picture comprehension (e.g. task design, collaboration, feedback, etc).
• Interaction between conceptual and perceptual factors in learning with verbal or visual representations
• Learning with multiple sources, including web-based instruction
• Impact of tasks and context on learning with text and picture instructions

New in 2016   Junior Researcher Awards
Proposals authored by a young researcher (PhD candidate at the time of submission) will be considered for a Best Paper and a Best Poster awards.

Download the full pdf of the first call, of the second call or of the third call.