The Conference at the University of Oviedo, Spain, within the 44th Annual Meeting of the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities, was an excellent opportunity to share knowledge, explore perspectives and reflect on the study of neurodevelopmental disorders in Europe and elsewhere in the world. The William M. Cruickshank…

In recent decades there has been great interest in the study of dyslexia and the difficulties that students with dyslexia presented in reading. The result of the various studies have found dyslexia as a complex disorder with a multifactorial genesis in the predominantly phonological difficulties, neuropsychological and other learning, among which…

This review highlights some areas of current interest in teaching students to spell and how spelling skills develop. The topics covered in the paper include: theories of spelling acquisition, theories guiding effective teaching, the importance of word study approaches across the age range, the influence of technology on learning to spell, spelling…

User participation is a key element in decision processes concerning the accommodation of dynamic organisations such as schools. This article addresses the discrepancy between the perspectives of the architects and engineers, as the makers of school buildings, and school management, teachers and students, as the users of the buildings, and…

The context of students as architects is used to examine the similarities and differences between prisms and pyramids. Leavy and Hourigan use the Van Hiele Model as a tool to support teachers to develop expectations for differentiating geometry in the classroom using practical examples.

This article introduces a novel approach to pedagogy within an art school in the UK HE sector, based upon a synthesis of perception theory and communication theory. It is argued that art students' drawing is empowered by strategies of teaching informed by aspects of James J. Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception relevant to an…

Tracy Logan and Tom Lowrie argue that while little attention is given to visual imagery and spatial reasoning within the Australian Curriculum, a significant proportion of National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tasks require high levels of visuospatial reasoning. This article includes teaching ideas to promote visuospatial…

This paper starts from the premise that drawing can be a means of visualising thinking, with an emphasis on the process involved. A gap often seems to exist in the minds of students of visual/material creative fields in ideas-generative contexts, between thought and action. The thesis is that the gap between thinking and doing can be reduced to…

This longitudinal case study presents John's journey through childhood and adolescence, living with visual difficulties associated with a cerebral visual impairment. It highlights the day-to-day problems that John encountered, giving practical solutions and strategies that have enabled his dream of going to a university to be realized. John and…

Art uses mathematics in many ways. The author's teaching and involvement with mathematics and art in the Bridges Conference connecting the two have convinced him more and more that concepts for understanding mathematics can be achieved by the use of art. The author states that one reason he believes in teaching mathematics through art is that it…

Geometry is an area in which Australian students performed particularly poorly on the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). One innovative area of recreational geometry that has rich potential to engage and challenge a wide variety of students is "impossible geometry." An impossible geometric object is a…

Curriculum guidelines, including the emergent Australian curriculum (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2009-10), indicate expectations that teachers will support their students' interpretation and creation of multimodal texts. However, English curriculum guidelines are yet to advise on a detailed metalanguage to…

Proponents of a self-identified "relativist" view of cross-language color naming have confounded two questions: (1) Is color naming largely subject to local linguistic convention? and (2) Are cross-language color naming differences reflected in comparable differences in color cognition by their speakers? The "relativist"…

We propose a computer-assisted cancellation test system (CACTS) to understand the visual attention performance and visual search strategies in school children. The main aim of this paper is to present our design and development of the CACTS and demonstrate some ways in which computer techniques can allow the educator not only to obtain more…

We propose an "Enhanced Perceptual Functioning" model encompassing the main differences between autistic and non-autistic social and non-social perceptual processing: locally oriented visual and auditory perception, enhanced low-level discrimination, use of a more posterior network in "complex" visual tasks, enhanced perception…