We studied the effect of adjunct displays on recall in an
expository text (based on McCrudden, Schraw, Lehman, &
Poliquin, 2007) in order to find out which means of display
aided pupils in the last years of secondary school to recall
information. We included four conditions in the experiment:
text only, text and causal diagram, text and images and causal
diagram only. Participants were checked for their recall of
main ideas and causal sequences. Recall for main ideas did
not vary significantly across conditions. Contrary to
McCrudden et al. (2007), our results for the causal sequences
revealed that participants who studied a causal diagram only
could recall more steps from causal sequences than
participants in any of the other conditions. We will interpret
the findings in the light of the literature on redundancy
effects, dual coding theory, and the causal explication
hypothesis.