The current study explores the connection and affordances of talk and gesture in collaborative science problem-solving activities using an emerging analytical approach. A total of 15 three to five-member groups of middle school students participated in a set of clinical collaborative science problem-solving activities. Six groups (three low- and…

Using Octavia Butler's prophetic writing, specifically, passages from her "Parable" series, as a conceptual lens, this article will explore the ways one Black girl uses multimodal literacies to imagine new worlds that center and celebrate her Black girlhood. An exploration of her multimodal literacies shows how she simultaneously…

As multimodal composition is gradually integrated into STEM learning, research is needed to examine how to fully connect multimodal composing practices and STEM practices to support students' STEM identity exploration. To fill in this gap, we conducted a design-based research project to investigate how students explored STEM identities in a…

Twenty-first-century students require support beyond the traditional confines of public K-12 education. Students are arriving at the doors of schools with challenges outside of the learning environment that impact their ability to achieve academic success. This dissertation conducts a program evaluation of a multimodal intervention program at a…

This article explores the written reflections and multimodal analyses of 31 middle school students who engaged with video games as texts. For four consecutive days, students spent 30 minutes playing video games and then 30 minutes writing reflections on their experiences and perceptions, resulting in 124 total reflections. Students focused on how…

Multilingual learners (MLs) often struggle with science conceptual learning partly due to the abstractness of the concepts and the complexity of scientific texts. This study presents a case of a Virtual Reality (VR) enhanced science learning unit to support middle-school students' science conceptual learning. Using a transformative mixed methods…

Students preferentially absorb and process information in diverse ways. Pedagogy should vary accordingly. The knowledge of teachers on the learners' preferred learning styles plays a pivotal role in better teaching and learning processes, contributing to a better-quality education. Still, little is known about the preferred learning style of…

Achieving an in-depth understanding of unfamiliar science concepts has been found to be difficult when learners can not index science language to relevant sensorimotor experiences. Ongoing research in embodied cognition highlights the importance of relevant sensorimotor experiences in understanding and learning new information. Aiming to foster…

Good writers don't wing it--they have a plethora of skills. They list, picture, circle, strategize and revise to make language come alive. They know what to use and when. Like ace athletes, they are highly trained, well-versed in the techniques found in this lively book. "Writing Workouts" provides a method for instruction that gives…

For literacy educators, there is a need to understand students' pathways into composition and mediate contemporary, multimodal compositional pathways with more academic ones. In an effort to mediate between middle and high school students' schooling and curricular demands and their everyday interests and investments in media and communicational…

In education it is important to celebrate all aspects of diversity, including different ways students learn. Addressing these diversities in the classroom is paramount for the success of every student. This research on learning styles may help in explaining the possible reasons for differences in students' achievement. The aim of this study was to…

This study analyzed the impact of different analogical learning approaches (analogies or metaphors) integrated with different presentation modalities (pictures or texts) on middle school students' learning performance of electricity with supporting evidence from their eye movement behaviors. Eighty ninth-grade middle school students were randomly…

This study investigates the multimodal construction of blame attributions in peer interaction during digital tasks in English as a Foreign Language classrooms. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis (CA), we examine how the force of blamings is manifested in and through the variety of resources used, and the role of digital devices in the…

While literacy research in the area of multimodality includes a range of communication modes, the combination of the visual and verbal modes is arguably the most common multimodal text form used in classroom contexts from posters, charts and information texts to picture books and graphic novels. Assessment of students' understanding of visual and…

With the rapid emergence of K-12 online learning platforms, a new era of education has been opened up. It is crucial to have a dropout warning framework to preemptively identify K-12 students who are at risk of dropping out of the online courses. Prior researchers have focused on predicting dropout in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which…