Story of a ‘storyline visualization’ in high school readings

Storyline visualization, as a process of illustrating data that has a course of events via a visual medium, has been used in the area of film making for a very long time. Not so long ago, it has moved from the paper version to the digital word allowing for a wider usage. In this paper we propose its usage as a teaching tool in the area of literature reading for the Croatian class (primary language). We have conducted a preliminary research in five Croatian high schools of a different profile to see how storyline visualization, and visualization of school materials in general, affects students understanding of the material being studied. Each school participated with two groups of students where one group was exposed to the storyline visualization of a novel Prokleta avlija by Ivo Andrić [N=103 in total] during the reading period, and the other one was reading without the visualization [N=93 in total]. We will present our results taking into account students' gender and type of a school.