Visual Layout and Storytelling as Tools for Communicating Cognitive Bias to Undergraduate Students in Taraba State University

Findings about the science of behaviour of people is hardly understood by non-specialist that is the people who have less or no experience in that part of science field just the same way undergraduate students only come across the concept of cognitive bias in an abstract sense that does not give deeper or clear understanding because it's a concept that only come across in textbooks or lecture slides. So this study sort to know whether the combination of structured learning layout together with narrative storytelling can improve the effect of understanding cognitive bias especially the confirmation of bias by undergraduate students in Taraba State University, Jalingo. The first page of a two page infographic presented the concept through organized text and visual hierarchy while the second page gave an illustration of the content in first page through a short story about an imaginary student, and this materials was shared to 30 undergraduate students from different facilities that include science, social science and humanities and the data was gathered through a structured questionnaire that has a combination of comprehension questions, a 4-point likert scale with 8 items and two open-ended questions. The findings showed a majority of undergraduate students with 73.3% gained full understanding of being able to confirm bias just after going through the materials one time and the total agreement of students throughout the 8 items reached 89.2%. Again the two items that addressed the effect of storytelling scored 93.3% and the answers gotten from the open-ended questions identified the narrative element as the feature that is most helpful with about half of the students describing how they personally got connected to the story with their own academic behaviour. This study concluded that instead of using one of the features, to combine layout and storytelling can lead to a better and stronger comprehension and personal relevance. So it recommended that science communicators and science educators who are preparing materials they can use to elaborate abstract concepts should be mindful to consider layout decisions like visual hierarchy, chunking and white space to be a basic part of material design and not just a finishing step of the content.

cognitive bias; science communication; visual layout; storytelling; undergraduate engagement; behavioural science

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