| Summary: | The purpose of this work was to see what thoughts, ideals, interpretations and feelings that students express when analyzing images from textbooks. I focused my work around four questions, what kind of pictures does the students encounter in their textbooks? Within what context are these images presented? How are the images interpreted by the students? And What positives and or negatives with the use of pictures in textbooks become apparent? To answer these questions, I needed pictures to work with, these were supplied by a teacher from a high school. The pictures were taken from a textbook that the teacher uses when teaching the students. This is because I wanted the students to analyze images that they encounter in their education and not “random images”. The students in question were all asked during a religious education class to complete a series of image analyses. The results of this was then presented and discussed with the use of literature about different problems with textbooks and the use of images. The results showed that the interpretation of images are both predictable and unpredictable in a way. The results show the use of strong common symbols is a way to convey information through images. But what was also apparent is that interpretation of images can be highly personal and is greatly influenced by the interpreters own opinions and prior knowledge. The literature suggests that images last longer in memory than text, which leaves me to believe that it is very important that the right images are chosen to represent the information that is being presented in textbooks. The positives with images is that they provide a relief in contrast to the text and also help to illustrate what the text is conveying. Problems that became apparent are that images can be interpreted in a lot of different ways and it is probably impossible to choose images that can not be interpreted in a negative way.
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