What kind of diagrams in a textbook help kids learn the best? Maybe it’s diagrams full of rich texture and detail, that draw the kids’ attention to the diagrams. Or maybe it’s clean, simple diagrams that don’t distract the kids but let them get to the essential idea right away.

It turns out that the answer depends on the age of the kids looking at the diagram. Education researchers including David Menendez in the group of Prof. Martha Alibali at the University of Wisconsin Madison decided to test what kind of diagrams would best help kids learn that ladybugs go through metamorphosis (i.e., change their bodies, from being larvae to pupae to the cute bugs that fly in through our windows). They chose metamorphosis because it is a tricky concept that they could use with both younger (1st and 2nd graders) and older kids (4th and 5th graders).

The younger kids learnt best with richer, colorful diagrams. In contrast, the older kids learnt about ladybugs just as well with either richer or simpler black-and-white line diagrams – but they could generalize the idea of metamorphosis to other species better after the simpler line diagrams. In sum, the simple line diagrams were better for the older kids while the richer colorful diagrams were better for the younger kids.

Teaching well is full of nuance and depends on many things! With this federally-funded efort, the researchers are figuring out how to help kids at each age learn the best.