The document describes revisions made to a timeline about Paul Revere's life created for third grade students. User testing identified areas for improvement, such as changing the orientation for projector use and adding borders. As a result, the orientation was changed and a dark border was added. Too many facts were initially included, so the most important seven facts were highlighted with a pale yellow background to make them stand out. The final version was more visually appealing and better suited as a teaching tool.
1. Paul Revere Biography Timeline
Lora Wendy Alligood
ITEC 7090 – Visual Literacy, Georgia Southern
June 2012
2. Paul Revere Biography Timeline
Audience: Third grade teachers at Youth Elementary and their students who are learning about
certain famous Americans as required by the curriculum. Most of the students are eight or nine
years old. Over 95% are native English speakers and Caucasian. The majority enter third grade,
reading on grade level which is between second grade fifth month (2.5 A.R. level) and third
grade fifth month (3.5 A.R. level). They have had some experience with time lines in the past in
both reading and math.
Graphic: The three steps for creating of hierarchy are chunking, providing a pathway and using
horizontal and vertical planes (Lohr, 2008, p. 124). With those elements in mind, I chose to
make a time line of the life of Paul Revere, the first of the nine famous Americans that third
graders are required to study. I began with a timeline template available for download free from
Microsoft. The original was very unappealing. It featured a tan background with white vertical
lines. The time line itself was a very thin maroon line. I began by choosing a landscape
orientation which would best use the available space and seemed more conducive to reading the
time line chronologically right to left. According to Lohr (2008, p. 129) citing a study by Winn
and Holiday (1985), “Students using the left-to-right diagram learned …better, theoretically
because left-to-right followed the reading sequence where left is first (oldest) and right is latest
(or youngest)”. I placed the title at the top; Lohr (2008, p. 120) states that the information placed
on the top of a visual space is interpreted as being the most important by those in Western
cultures; this is most likely because we read from top to bottom. The title is a cue that establishes
the content. I chose to place the actual time line in the middle section of the space since
“hierarchy deals with communicating the relative importance between elements in a display”
3. (Lohr, 2008, p. 122). When you consider hierarchy you ask yourself “What do I want the
user/learner to look at first, second, third?” (Lohr, 2008. P. 123). I considered placing the pictures
into the time line but decided to place them at the bottom based on the fact that the data is more
important than the pictures, and pictures might make this area appear cluttered. Putting pictures
at the bottom suggests they are less important than the facts. This is also taking Tufte’s (1990)
advice relating to “chartjunk” into consideration (Lohr, 2008, p. 139). The middle area of the
space originally included vertical white lines that were very useful when aligning the arrows;
however, in the finished product they would have been very distracting and an example of
chartjunk. I eliminated those as soon as I was finished with the arrows. According to Fleming
(1968) as cited by Lohr (2008, page 147) “lines and arrows…strengthen relationships. Thicker
lines between elements suggest a stronger connection or relationship than do thin lines, and
arrows imply an even stronger relationship.” The original template used thin lines for the
timeline itself and to connect the facts to the timeline; I thickened those and used arrows to
provide the pathway from the year on the timeline to the data and to the relevant picture which
reduces the learner’s cognitive and intrinsic loads (Lohr, 2008, page 123). Since color and size
contrast can also be used to convey hierarchical information, I divided the space horizontally into
three areas using different colored backgrounds for the title, timeline and pictures (Lohr, 2008,
page 133).
User Test: Noelle Smith, a colleague who also teaches third grade at my school. She is familiar
with the content and has taught the unit on famous Americans including Paul Revere for the past
two years as part of our Social Studies curriculum. Noelle is also very technically adept; she
maintains the school’s webpage and was asked to do a nine week pilot with I-Pads this past
spring. Noelle pointed out that I would want to change the orientation in order to use the image
4. with the LCD projectors we have in our classrooms. Although I would have to make the image
smaller on the paper, this would not matter once it was projected. She also suggested a dark
border since the title block would blend with the screen when projected just as it does on the
white page as seen in this document. See Appendix A.
Barbara May, an administrative assistant/bid manager and my personal computer guru. She is my
sister and I call her whenever I can’t get the computer to do what I want it to. She has experience
in creating visuals for various uses for her job including creating proposals and recently did a
project that was included in her hometown’s utility bill that demonstrated the benefits of
permeable pavers that allow water to run-off rather than collect. Barbara suggested capitalizing
the first letter in each box on the timeline as well as shading the most important facts a very pale
yellow. I chose not to take her suggestion concerning capitalization since many of the boxes
contain phrases rather than complete sentences; third graders are still struggling with the
difference between a sentence and a fragment, so I do not want to add to their confusion by
capitalizing fragments. I did like the idea of changing the background color for the most
important facts.
Changes: As a result of my user tests, I made several changes including changing the
background color of the boxes containing the most important facts and adding a dark border
around the entire graphic. The original time line had eleven white boxes; since they were treated
the same, the information appeared to be equally important. This is not the case and there were
also too many facts for efficient learning. “Information that is grouped into no more than seven
to nine chunks (or three to five depending on whose research you follow) is more likely to be
remembered or efficiently used than information that is not chunked” (Lohr, 2008, page 152). A
pale yellow background groups the seven most important facts into a more manageable chunk.
5. The dark border adds contrast. See Appendix B. The final version is more visually appealing and
a better teaching/learning tool.
