The effects of infographic's layouts on reading comprehension and memory retention: Applications in Bilingual education and multimedia learning

In the technological era, integrating technology in education becomes an indispensable trend. Especially in the critical situation of COVID19 pandemic, e-Learning is the main approach for teaching and learning due to its convenience. In addition, with the popularity of bilingual education and the implementation of EMI (English as a Medium Instruction) and CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), students need to study content subjects in English or a second language. However, a lot of students have difficulties reading in English and memorizing the knowledge due to insufficient lexical competence. Infographic has been proved to be an effective tool to increase reading comprehension and knowledge retention, both in language learning as well as science subjects. In this work, I would like to investigate the effects of infographics on reading comprehension and knowledge retention, focusing on layouts. The layouts of infographics used in this study were designed carefully based on Mayer’s principles for multimedia learning. The research was conducted with 28 participants aged 20-35 who are studying at a university in Taiwan. The participants were randomly assigned to read one of two infographics with different layouts while their eye movements were observed and recorded by an eye-tracking device. The results from the post-test and retention test show that there is a statistically significant difference between Infographic 1 group and Infographic 2 group. It is found that Infographic 1with layouts designed followed principles of reducing cognitive load for multimedia learning assists students effectively in reading comprehension and memory retention.