By following their wonderful ideas or critical exploration, three eighth graders learned how to do traditional Chinese painting, which is taught by copying old masters' work from the Ming Dynasty in the 17th century. The standard manual, which most learners have been using for these three hundred years, is the "Mustard Seed Garden Manual of…

This article presents 3 studies that examine how students and experts employ mental rotation and a learned heuristic to solve chemistry tasks that involve spatial information. Results from Study 1 indicate that despite instruction in analytical strategies, students choose to employ mental rotation on canonical assessment tasks. In Study 2, experts…

The author partially describes a few of the immanent qualities of dreaming imagery and metaphor. The concept of the ineluctable modality is introduced to illustrate the spontaneous synthesizing of cognitive and noncognitive elements. A short dream excerpt is shared to clarify the pervasive contrapuntallike depth of dreaming imagery. (Author/SJL)

This report describes a program for increasing students' ability to simplify square roots. The targeted population consisted of high school students in a rural community in a midwestern plains state. The problem of the ability to understand the abstract algebraic process of simplifying square roots was documented through teacher-made tests,…

This article examines the state of knowledge on the creative process, especially mathematical-scientific, verbal, musical, and artistic imagery. A creative imagination imagery model is proposed which has three major dimensions: the environment, the individual (with both content and process components considered in terms of the Structure of…

In an investigation into the process of retrieval from very long term memory, four subjects who had been out of high school from 4 to 19 years were asked to think aloud while attempting to recall the names of their high school classmates. The retrievals were found to be characterized by overshoot, systematic hypothesizing, fabrications, the…

Concludes that the significant difference found between responses made to displayed drawings and those made to models suggests that, independently of the complexity of stimulus, encoding will not influence responses if the very economical process of simple coding can be used. (Author/AM)

Studied the extent to which collaborative knowledge construction can be fostered by providing students with visualization tools as structural support. Results for 32 college students working in dyads show that providing a content-specific visualization tool improves both the process and the outcome of the cooperative effort. (SLD)

Examines types of graphical representation as to their suitability for knowledge acquisition in primary grades. Uses the concept of mental models to clarify the relationship between external presentation and internal representation of knowledge. Finds that students who learned with highly elaborated and highly structured pictures displayed the…

This study with 16 adolescents with mental retardation compared free-recall rates under two encoding conditions: (1) fade-in, initially presenting pictures out of focus then slowly fading them into focus; and (2) fade-out, slowly blurring originally clear pictures. Results indicated that free-recall rates were greater for the fade-in items for…

This study compares the tendency for numerals to elicit spontaneous perceptions of colour or taste (synaesthesia) with the tendency to visualise numbers as occupying particular visuo-spatial configurations (number forms). The prevalence of number forms was found to be significantly higher in synaesthetes experiencing colour compared both to…

A study of conceptual and relational responses of subjects when recalling the semantic content of a text they have just heard. Responses can be overgeneralized and inferred. Responses studied reflect processes of adjustment during acquisition of information and the processes occurring during recall. (SC)

Debate over whether mental images are visual or spatial representations is seen as based on the false premise that they must be one or the other. Visual neurophysiological research and experiments with a brain-damaged patient (impaired visual representations) suggest that mental imagery has distinct visual and spatial representation components.…