The effectiveness of teaching science with pictorial analogies

This study used a conceptual problem solving test to investigate the effect of a series of pictorial analogies on the concepts of density, pressure, and atmospheric pressure in Year 8 classrooms. The analogies were taught following Glynn's teaching with analogies model. It was found that the students taught with the pictorial analogies scored significantly higher than their counterparts (p<.01). In addition, the low achievers benefited more from this teaching strategy than did the high achievers. Further, qualitative analysis revealed that most of the students' alternative conceptions were from preexisting naive intuitions rather than arising from analog instruction.