Summary.Research has shown that the effect of illustrations on children's learning of science is related to ability. This study examines the hypothesis that children who show different levels of success in a learning task will employ different strategies in their picture‐text processing. One hundred and eighty 14 year‐old children were required to learn three illustrated science topics of different levels of difficulty which were presented to them on a BBC micro‐computer. The computer was programmed to record the time spent on each sentence and each picture, as well as the point in the text at which the picture was accessed. Post hoc testing enabled the children to be divided into six groups according to their success rates on the learning tasks. Significantly longer times were spent looking at the pictures as the topics increased in difficulty; also the amount of time spent looking at pictures increased as the learning of the children decreased. For every second the least successful children spent accessing pictures, they spent about four seconds reading the text; for the most successful children this ratio was about one‐to‐six. The least successful children also accessed the pictures significantly more frequently than the most successful. The different strategies used by the children are discussed in terms of what is known about their differential learning gains from illustra