Reading comprehension has been mostly studied using traditional texts and very little is known about reading comprehension in comics. We wanted to find out whether comics could enhance comprehension processes, compared to traditional text and what cognitive processes might be involved in this effect. Furthermore, we explored the functional role of…

Manga, a Japanese comic, conveys contextual information about underlying stories based on the expression of a mixture of textual and pictorial elements. Two experiments were designed to assess whether individuals' eye movements when reading manga were consistent, independent of the specific materials, and stable over time. Experiment 1 examined…

Seductive details are interesting but irrelevant details that impede text comprehension (Mayer, 2005). Whether visual images can act as seductive details remains unclear (Rey, 2012). In two experiments, 125 undergraduates read 10 pages from a leading educational psychology textbook that either included illustrated cartoons or not, followed by a…

How can a student experience what happens in the mind of a mathematician while solving a problem? In this paper we discuss a theoretical design of an educational script, based on digital interactive storytelling. Parallel to Docter's 'Inside Out', the cognitive functions occurring in problem solving become characters of a story-problem. Students…

This interdisciplinary, conceptual analysis addresses the nature and benefits of artistic processes in learning and work. While recognizing various forms of artistry, the emphasis is on visual-spatial thinking. The benefits of this kind of thinking in academic and professional activities include the simplification of massively complex writing,…

Research in verbal and visual narratives has often emphasized backward-looking inferences, where absent information is subsequently inferred. However, comics use conventions like star-shaped "action stars" where a reader "knows" events are undepicted "at that moment," rather than omitted entirely. We contrasted the…

This study aimed to make and introduce a curriculum in Taiwan for fifth-grade students, merging Scratch animation with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The curriculum combined the Scratch Reflective AI digital learning platform with conventional teaching methods to assess its effect on students' empathy, self-efficacy, and scriptwriting…

Before taking formal science education, learners usually construct preconceptions based on their daily life experiences, many of which are scientifically unacceptable misconceptions. In formal science learning, new concepts often contradict these misconceptions. To correct a misconception, it is first needed to create dissatisfaction about it by…

Much research has focused on the expression of voluntary motion (Slobin, 2004; Talmy, 2000). The present study contributes to this body of research by comparing how children (three to ten years) and adults narrated short, animated cartoons in English and German (SATELLITE-FRAMED languages) vs. French (VERB-FRAMED). The cartoons showed agents…

It is common in the everyday art class to find many examples of avoidance, omission and exaggeration in young adolescents' depictions of the human figure. When students depict sophisticated human images, they make every effort to avoid the difficult parts, and some students tend to exaggerate the size or distort the shape of the human image. Art…

Previous research has shown that using gestures helps children remember more information. Here, we designed two studies to test whether children who gesture tend to rely on visuospatial cognitive resources more than children who do not gesture. We also test whether children who gesture demonstrate more creativity in their narrative productions.…

Notions of accessibility bring to question the perceived deficits in narrative comprehension for autistic people. This deficit has been positioned as having a cognitive processing disposition towards local coherence, rather than global coherence. Rather than a unitary deficit in the individual, reduced performance on inferential narrative…

We constructed a new taxonomy for inferential thinking, a construct called Integrative Inferential Reasoning (IIR). IIR extends Pearson and Johnson's (1978) framework of "text-implicit" and "script-implicit" question-answer relations, and integrates several other prominent literacy theories to form a unified inferential…

Graphic novels are a form of authentic text that have started to gain widespread acceptance in the English language arts field and have been shown to increase students' motivation to read and engage deeply with texts. By integrating text with pictures, graphic novels have the advantage of requiring a lighter cognitive load than traditional…

Many studies report that comics are useful as learning material. However, there is little known about how learning with comics works. Based on previously established theories about multimedia learning, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment to examine learning about geography with a specially designed combination of comic and map which we call…