Show & Tell lessons: why students remember more when you show and explain

Talking at a class is not the same as teaching a class. Students hear the explanation, then try to build a picture in their heads from language alone. A Show & Tell lesson short-circuits that guesswork: you show the idea while you tell it.

That format is older than any slide deck. A teacher holds up a seed, names the parts, and walks through what happens next. A parent points at a diagram on the homework page instead of repeating the definition. The research name for the same move is dual coding: process the idea in words and in images at the same time.

This is not the same claim as "visual learners need pictures." Learning-styles matching does not hold up. Dual coding does. In a direct comparison, students prompted to process visual and linguistic information together retained twice as much as students who relied on linguistic cues alone.

This guide explains what a presentation-style Show & Tell lesson is, the studies behind it, the classroom benefits, and how to build one in DrawPaw.

TL;DR: A Show & Tell lesson is a presentation-style sequence: students see a relevant image, diagram, object, or step while they hear or read the explanation. Cuevas and Dawson (2018) found that 204 university students in a visual-processing condition recalled a mean of 16.37 items (81.9%) versus 8.03 items (40.2%) in a linguistic-only condition, with no benefit from self-identified learning style. Pair the picture with the words. Decorative clip art does not count. DrawPaw generates editable lesson slides you can illustrate from a library of 10,000+ images or with AI, then share or export to PowerPoint. It is free to start, with no credit card required.

Key Takeaways

1. Show & Tell lessons pair a relevant visual with spoken or written explanation so students encode the same idea twice.
2. Matching instruction to a preferred "learning style" is not supported. Dual coding, using words and images together for everyone, is.
3. In Cuevas and Dawson's 2018 study, the visual-processing group retained twice as much information as the linguistic-only group (16.37 vs. 8.03 items). Learning-style preference did not predict scores.
4. Mayer's multimedia research found the same pattern for teaching materials: words plus pictures beat words alone in 13 of 13 tests, with a large median effect size.
5. Classroom payoffs include stronger recall, clearer explanations, vocabulary that sticks, and a shared picture students can point to and retell.
6. DrawPaw is built for this format: generate a lesson presentation, add visuals that carry the meaning, then edit and teach.

What a Show & Tell Lesson Actually Is

A Show & Tell lesson is a presentation-style lesson, not a personality type. Students look at a visual that carries the meaning, such as an image, diagram, object, labeled sequence, or short animation, while you explain it in language they can use.

The "show" has to do work. A photo of a water cycle, a fraction bar, a labeled insect, or a timeline of a story is Show & Tell. A cartoon in the corner of a text-heavy slide is decoration.

The "tell" is the language: the definition, the steps, the cause, the academic vocabulary. You point, name, and connect. Students then use that same visual to retell, compare, or answer.

That is different from three common substitutes:

• A lecture with no visual. Students hold the whole idea in working memory as words.
• A worksheet with no talk. The picture is there, but nobody walks through it.
• A learning-styles rotation. Visual students get a poster, auditory students get a speech, kinesthetic students get a craft. The evidence does not support splitting the class that way.

Show & Tell is one shared presentation: everyone sees the idea, everyone hears the language.

Pro Tip: If you can cover the image and the slide still makes sense as a paragraph, the visual is not doing the teaching. If you can mute the explanation and a student still cannot tell what the picture is for, the language is missing. You need both.

Learning Styles Failed. Dual Coding Did Not.

Teachers did not invent the learning-styles idea out of nowhere. Surveys keep finding that most educators still endorse it. Dekker, Lee, Howard-Jones, and Jolles (2012) asked 242 primary and secondary teachers in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands about brain-based claims. Ninety-three percent of the UK teachers and 96 percent of the Dutch teachers agreed that individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style (for example visual, auditory, or kinesthetic).

The research base does not support that matching rule. Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork (2008) reviewed the "meshing" hypothesis, the idea that visual learners should get visual instruction and auditory learners should get auditory instruction, and concluded there was not an adequate evidence base for using learning-style assessments in general educational practice.

Dual coding theory, developed by Allan Paivio, makes a different prediction. Humans can store an idea in a verbal code and a visual code. When those codes refer to the same content, recall has two routes instead of one. That prediction is testable, and it does not depend on a student identifying as a "visual learner."

Cuevas and Dawson (2018) put the two models in the same experiment. They surveyed 204 university students on VARK learning-style preference (visual, auditory, read/write, kinesthetic), then presented information that students were prompted to process either through imagery or through linguistic features alone.

The learning-styles prediction failed. There was no significant interaction between preferred style and condition. None of the four styles predicted retention. The main effect of learning style was not significant, F(1, 179) = 0.968, p = .327, partial η² = .005.

The dual-coding prediction held. Students in the visual condition retained twice as much information as students in the linguistic-only condition, regardless of the style they had claimed.

Condition accounted for about 60 percent of the variance in scores. Students whose stated style was "mismatched" to the visual condition still outperformed students in the linguistic-only condition. Auditory-preferring students in the visual condition recalled a mean of 16.74 items (83.7 percent). Visual-preferring students in the visual condition recalled 15.68 (78.4 percent). In the linguistic-only condition, both groups sat near 40 percent.

That is the finding behind the line you will see quoted from this study: students prompted to process visual and linguistic data together retained twice as much information as those relying on linguistic cues alone.

It is one experiment, with university students, using imagery prompts on presented information. It is not a guarantee that every illustrated Grade 2 slide will double a quiz score. It is strong evidence that the mechanism Show & Tell uses, visual processing layered on language, beats language alone, and that sorting students by learning style is the wrong lever.

Richard Mayer's multimedia research points the same direction for actual teaching materials. Across 13 of 13 tests, learners who received words and pictures (text plus illustrations, or narration plus animation) outperformed learners who received words alone on transfer tests, with a median effect size of d = 1.35. In education research, that is a large effect.

The practical translation is simple. Do not diagnose a learning style. Build a presentation in which the picture and the sentence teach the same idea.

Benefits of Presentation-Style Lessons

The research is about memory. Teachers feel the difference in the room. Presentation-style Show & Tell lessons help in several concrete ways.

Students remember more of what you taught. Two codes for the same idea give retrieval two chances. Cuevas and Dawson measured that gap as 81.9 percent versus 40.2 percent on a recall task. Mayer measured it as better transfer when words and pictures were combined. A student who later forgets the verbal definition can still recover the diagram, then the language that went with it.

Abstract ideas become pointable. "Evaporation" is a word. An arrow leaving a puddle is something a Grade 3 student can point to and name. Fractions, food webs, story structure, and government branches all get easier when the idea has a shape.

Vocabulary has somewhere to stick. New academic words compete with each other in a spoken explanation. A labeled visual ties the word to a part, a step, or an example. Students can rehearse the term while looking at the referent instead of reciting a glossary.

You get a shared reference for talk. Once the image is on the board, you can ask "What is happening in this box?" instead of "Who remembers what I said?" That is participation with a scaffold, not a memory test of your lecture.

Differentiation gets simpler. You do not need a separate "visual" packet and a separate "auditory" packet. You keep the same diagram and adjust the language, the number of steps, or the independent task. Struggling readers still have the picture. Strong readers still have the precise terms.

Parents can reteach from the same picture. Homework help often fails because the kitchen-table explanation does not match the method from class. A Show & Tell slide the child already saw is a better prompt than a new speech. For the line between helping and doing the work, see Parents help or reinforcing misconceptions.

None of those benefits come from filling slides with clip art. They come from a visual that is the content, paired with language that names it.

What a Show & Tell Lesson Looks Like in Class

Here is a Grade 3 science block on the water cycle, taught as Show & Tell rather than as a paragraph on the board.

1. Show the whole system first. Put up one clear diagram: ocean, sun, cloud, rain, arrows. Do not start with a definition. Give students ten seconds to look.

2. Tell the names while you point. "This arrow leaving the water is evaporation. The water is turning into vapor you cannot see." One idea per gesture. Do not read a paragraph while the diagram sits ignored on the left.

3. Trace the sequence. Move from evaporation to condensation to precipitation and collection. Students should be able to follow the arrows with a finger or a pointer.

4. Students retell from the visual. Cover the labels. Ask a pair to name each arrow. The picture stays; the language has to come from them.

5. Check with a small production task. Students sketch the cycle from memory and label three processes, or they sort four captions onto a blank diagram. You are testing whether the two codes connected, not whether they copied notes.

The same spine works for other subjects:

• Math: show a fraction bar or number line, then tell the operation while you mark it.
• ELA: show a short passage with the main idea highlighted, then tell how the details support it. DrawPaw can generate that as a main idea and supporting details lesson.
• Kindergarten: show one large image, one short sentence, one oral retell. Early years lessons live on visuals and pacing. A kindergarten lesson generator is useful here because the deck has to stay short.

A useful test after you build the deck: mute yourself and ask whether the slides still show a sequence. Then hide the images and ask whether the remaining sentences are worth saying. Both halves should survive.

How to Build a Show & Tell Lesson in DrawPaw

The bottleneck is rarely the research. It is the hour it takes to find a clean diagram, write the language, and sequence the slides. DrawPaw is an AI lesson planner that generates a presentation-style lesson from a prompt, then lets you put the visual on the idea.

Step 1: Prompt for a presentation, not a packet. Include grade, standard, and the visual you need. Example: "Grade 3 science, water cycle, Show & Tell lesson. One clear diagram of evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and collection. Short labels. Students retell the cycle, then label a blank diagram." Specific prompts produce better decks than a topic name. For more on aligning objectives to a standard, see Create curriculum-aligned lesson slides in minutes.

Step 2: Make the visual carry the meaning. DrawPaw generates objectives, activities, materials, and slide outlines. Then you illustrate. Pull from a library of 10,000+ images across 27 categories, generate an image with AI, or upload a photo of the object you will hold up. Replace any decorative image that does not teach.

Step 3: Edit the language so it matches the picture. Use the drag-and-drop editor to cut extra sentences, move the diagram to the center, and keep one idea per slide. If you have a reading passage or an existing outline, upload it so the examples match your class.

Step 4: Teach from the deck, then export if you need to. Share from DrawPaw or download as PowerPoint. Walk through the image. Ask students to retell. Do not read every bullet.

DrawPaw is free to start, with no credit card required. Treat the output as a draft. A generated slide with the wrong cognitive demand is still the wrong lesson, even if the picture is attractive.

Pro Tip: After generation, delete any slide that repeats the same sentence the diagram already shows. Redundant text that you also read aloud loads the verbal channel twice and can cancel the benefit you are trying to get.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Show & Tell lesson?

A Show & Tell lesson is a presentation-style sequence in which students see a relevant visual while they hear or read the explanation. The visual has to carry the content, not sit next to it as decoration. Students then use that same image to retell, label, or apply the idea.

Is Show & Tell the same as teaching to learning styles?

No. Learning-styles instruction sorts students by preference and matches the medium to the label. Show & Tell gives every student complementary visual and linguistic information. Pashler and colleagues (2008) found inadequate evidence for matching. Cuevas and Dawson (2018) found no retention benefit from preferred style, and a large benefit from visual-plus-linguistic processing.

Did students really retain twice as much information?

In Cuevas and Dawson's 2018 study of 204 university students, the visual-processing group recalled a mean of 16.37 items (81.9 percent) and the linguistic-only group recalled 8.03 items (40.2 percent). That is twice as much in that experiment. It is not a promise that every illustrated lesson will double a classroom test score.

Do pictures always help?

No. The picture has to represent the same idea as the words. Irrelevant clip art, tiny unlabeled diagrams, and slides packed with text you then read aloud can fail or backfire. Mayer's multimedia principle is words and pictures together, not words plus noise.

Can I use Show & Tell lessons with DrawPaw?

Yes. Prompt for a presentation-style lesson with a specific visual, generate the deck, then add or swap images from the library, AI generation, or your own uploads. Edit until each slide has one idea and a visual that teaches it. Ready-to-use templates are available if you want a starting layout.

Can parents use Show & Tell for homework?

Yes. Generate a short visual explanation of tonight's topic, sit with the child, point at the diagram, and let the child try the problem. Do not complete the work for them. A matched explanation beats a generic packet. DrawPaw is free to start.

Conclusion

The useful finding is not that some children are visual. It is that memory is stronger when an idea is shown and told together.

Cuevas and Dawson measured that as twice the recall for visual-plus-linguistic processing versus language alone. Mayer measured it as large gains on transfer tests when words and pictures were combined. Learning-style labels did not predict the outcome. The format did.

A Show & Tell lesson is that format in a classroom: one clear visual, language that names it, and a chance for students to retell from the picture. Try DrawPaw for free, generate the lesson you have to teach this week, and put the image on the idea before you add another sentence.

Last updated: August 2026