Most basic concepts are acquired during preschool period. There are studies indicating that the basic concept knowledge of children is related to language development, cognitive development, academic achievement and intelligence. The relationship between learning behaviors (sometime called learning or cognitive styles) and a child academic success…

This paper presents the thesis that a perceptual rationale for visual literacy may be found in operational form within what is measured by established tests of cognitive style. Ten primary dimensions of cognitive style are briefly reviewed, including field independence-field dependence, impulsivity-reflectivity, visual-haptic, leveling-sharpening,…

Examines one aspect of the cognitive development of preservice education students, the ability to utilize different modes of mental representation. Finds associations between the level of mathematics experience and both the ability to utilize three different modes of mental representation (enactive, visual, and verbal) and the overall use of…

Describes the Agam program, a 36-unit curriculum program to introduce students to basic visual concepts and that applies visual abilities and visual thinking to learning tasks. Describes two units at the third grade level, "Ratio and Proportion" and "Numerical Intuition," and makes observations of the students' learning. (MDH)

Presented are six activities that help to promote critical and creative student thinking. Activities include discrepant events and questioning, divergent thinking, dilemma discussions, and drawing objects from symbols. Activities can be adapted to any science discipline. (KR)

Describes journal writing as an element of multimodal teaching. Discusses how students utilize journal writing that includes pictures, numbers, symbols, and manipulatives to help understand mathematical concepts. Provides a form to evaluate students' portfolio writing and examples of students' evaluated work. (Contains 12 references.) (MDH)

Presents the results of a study contrasting conventional instruction with protocol lessons (a sequence of lessons based on developmental stages of learning with each lesson building on the previous one) concerning sketch maps. The students taught with the protocol lessons showed significant improvement over the other group. (MJP)