An innovative educational technology called interactive virtual and physical manipulatives (VPM) is developed to improve students' spatial skills. With VPM technology, not only can students touch and play with real-world physical manipulatives in their hands but also they can see how the corresponding virtual manipulatives (i.e., computer…

This study evaluated a bilingual text-mining system, which incorporated a bilingual taxonomy of key words and provided hierarchical visualization, for understanding learner-generated text in the learning management systems through automatic identification and counting of matching key words. A class of 27 in-service teachers studied a course…

The aim of this research was to establish whether gender and age have an impact on spatial reasoning and its development through the use of 3D modeling. The study was conducted on a sample of 196 children from sixth to ninth grade, of whom 95 represented the experimental group and 101 the control group. The experimental group received 3D modeling…

The purpose of the two experiments was to investigate the potential effects of different types of visualizations and self-explanation prompts on learning human cardiovascular system in a multimedia environment. In Experiments 1 and 2, 70 and 44 college students were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions in a 2 × 2 factorial design with…

Can learning of mental imagery skills for visualizing shapes be accelerated with feature masking? Chemistry, physics fine arts, military tactics, and laparoscopic surgery often depend on mentally visualizing shapes in their absence. Does working with "spatial feature-masks" (skeletal shapes, missing key identifying portions) encourage people to…