Emphasizing Figure and Ground

My task this week has to do with emphasizing figure and ground.  Lohr, 2008, tells us that figure is the important components of the graphic, whereas the ground are the supporting details (p. 108).  My unit of instruction focuses on students creating a healthy plate.  They cannot do this without knowing how much major and minor nutrients our bodies need every day.  Using several principles of figure/ground, I created an organizer for students to record the daily nutrient amounts for both females and males of their age.

Within my graphic, I've included three key characteristics of effective instructional visuals include concise, concrete, and concentrated.  My graphic is concise as it helps the learner distinguish the information.  I've used darker grays on the headings to call attention to them, and to help the learner distinguish between them and the major or minor categories beneath.  In addition to using the grays to highlight the figure, I've also used a different color.  For this unit, my learners are focusing on recommended dietary allowances (RDA) for their age group.  When students use this graphic to research the amounts in each category, they will find many charts that list the RDAs for people of all age categories. The charts can be very overwhelming because they list data for every person. This concentrated graphic will help students to understand what is needed for people in their age group.  Finally, my graphic is concrete because the headings help the students determine that they are interested in finding daily needs of each nutrient.  In addition to that, students will find out that each nutrient will either be a milligram or a microgram.

Initially, I used a light background fill color for each of the different nutrient types. For example, my major nutrient was red, vitamins were blue, and minerals were green. My reviewer found that to be too much color, so I changed it to dark and light grays.

Figure/Ground Organizer  


Lohr, L.L. (2008).  Creating graphics for learning and performance: Lessons in visual literacy (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle, NJ:Pearson