Text, Table and Graph -- Which is Faster and More Accurate to Understand?

Abstract

Today's school and college textbooks are full of static, multimodal content. This research investigates which of the three modalities - text, table or graph - is more efficient in conveying a given message to students. For fixed content, we hypothesized that graph representation is better of the three for comprehension. Experiment results (N=25)suggest that graphs are indeed 25.5% faster to understand than text and 46.5% faster than tables. In terms of accuracy of responses, graphs were 13.5% worse than text and 8.6%more accurate than tables. When the ratio of amount of accurate answers for each second taken to respond was checked, graphs were faster as they enabled downloading of5.7% of the answer in one second time, whereas text downloaded only 3.6% and table only 3.9%. For our experimental data, it appears that graph mode might be faster but less accurate. However, when it comes to amount of correct comprehension, graph mode does come out better.