A picture is worth a thousand words: The effectiveness of infographics in microeconomic principles courses

Abstract

We investigate the impact of infographics on student learning in principles of economics classes. Infographics display facts, data, and information about a specific topic in a clear and easy to understand manner, using graphics and pictures to help summarize, explain, and display information. Creating an infographic can be a fun, engaging, and powerful educational tool for learning new topics in both introductory and advanced courses. We use a randomized classroom experiment to evaluate the effect of creating infographics on student learning in principles of microeconomics courses as measured by exam performance. The randomization across topics enables a student-fixed effects estimation of the effect of infographics. We find students were 2.1–2.2 percentage points more likely to answer a multiple-choice question correctly relating to the topics for which they completed an infographic relative to those they did not. We provide suggestive evidence that infographics may help higher ability students most, increasing their scores on both multiple choice and short answer questions.