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Texts and pictures are often combined in order to improve learning. Many students, however, have difficulty to appropriately process text-picture combinations. We have thus conceptualized a learning strategy which supports learning from illustrated texts. By inducing the processes of information selection, organization, integration, and transformation, the learning strategy should lead to a more elaborated learning. After conducting a pilot study, a main study with 133 sixth-grade students from two different middle schools was carried out in order to analyse the learning effectiveness of the strategy. One group of students learned without the strategy whereas the second group learned with the strategy. All students had to complete a pre-test as well as a post-test which followed the learning period. The learning outcomes of the two groups were then compared: both studies demonstrated that the students who employed the strategy attained significantly better learning results. The effect sizes are medium to large.

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Pictorial representations can play a pivotal role in both printed and digital learning material. Although there has been extensive research on cognitive techniques and strategies for learning from text, the same cannot be said for static and dynamic pictorial representations. In this paper we propose a systematic characterization of cognitive learning techniques that is founded on both theoretical and empirical research. The characterization relates the learning techniques to classes of cognitive processes as well as to textual and pictorial representations. We show how successful strategies for learning from both plain text and illustrated text are covered by the characterization. We also exemplify how the construction of new strategies for pictorial representations can be informed by the characterization.Early research on learning strategies was carried out at a time when written text was the dominant form of information representation. Unsurprisingly, it focused on textual representation with the main objective being to identify how successful and less successful learners differed in their strategic behavior during learning. Marton and Säljö (1984), for example, empirically identified two different approaches to learning from texts. They distinguished between a surface level approach, such as the repeated reciting of text in order to remember it, and

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