This report considers the science of adult literacy acquisition, with the goal of identifying principles that may improve the effectiveness of adult literacy programs. We define literacy as a continuum, from emerging literacy, through improving literacy, to fluent literacy and we outline the factors that influence how far along that continuum an…

In 2014 the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Harvard Medical School began a partnership focused on building visual literacy skills for dermatology residents in the Harvard Combined Dermatology Residency Program. "Refining the Eye: Art and Dermatology", a four session workshop, took place in the museum's galleries and utilized the Visual…

The abilities to identify threat and learn about affect in facial photographs were compared between a non-autistic university student group (NUS), a matched Asperger's group (MAS) on the Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM), and an unmatched Asperger's group (UAS) who scored lower on the SPM. Participants were given pairs of faces and asked which…

Objective: To examine the ability of the flicker task to demonstrate greater utility in discriminating performance in young adults with and without ADHD compared to the Conners' CPT (CCPT). Method: Flicker task and CCPT performance were compared between an ADHD (n = 28) and control (n = 30) group of college students. Results: This study replicated…

We have previously reported in this journal that spatial ability influences academic performance in engineering. We have also reported that spatial ability is trainable, and can be increased through instruction focused on using perception and mental imagery in three-dimensional representation. In this article, we present the results of a…

A training series, designed to increase kindergarteners' conceptual and visual perception skills in dealing with texture, was evaluated. Improvement occurred in subjects' ability to describe texture and to use it in artwork, but the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts indicated that ability to form new concepts was not fostered. (SJL)

This paper examines research studies, which focus on interventions commonly used with students who are learning disabled and identify effective methods that produce substantial benefits concerning reading comprehension. This paper synthesizes previous observation studies by conducting a meta-analysis of strategies used to improve the reading…

This study examines how task characteristics (the number of visual chunks and the amount of planning time) and test-taker characteristics (graph familiarity) influence the perceptual and cognitive processes involved in graph comprehension, the strategies used in describing graphs, and the scores obtained on the graph description task in a…