Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine if university students could accurately extract information from graphs presented in 2D or 3D formats with different colour hue variations or solid black and white. Design/methodology/approach: Participants are presented with 2D and 3D bar and pie charts in a PowerPoint presentation and are asked to…

Gives evidence of how and why feature films are effective instructional tools, particularly when teaching concepts of human development to college students. Explains that use of films helps to dramatize and frame issues, generate discussion, and provide links with personal experience. Uses several examples from movies to help explain the…

Compares the visual and auditory processing factors of the Woodcock Johnson Tests of Cognitive Ability, Revised (WJR COG) and the visual and auditory memory factors of the Learning Efficiency Test, II (LET-II) among 120 college students. Results indicate two significant performance differences between the WJR COG and LET-II. (RJM)

Compared multimodal instruction with text and pictures with unimodal text-only instruction as 44 college students used a visual or textual manual to learn a complex software application. Results initially support dual coding theory and indicate that multimodal instruction led to better performance than unimodal instruction. (SLD)

This study investigated conditions for optimizing college students' analogical problem solving. Students given pictorial (not verbal) representations of solutions to source problems were better problem solvers, as were students given a longer time. Students who derived personal solution principles to source problems were not superior to students…

Five experiments involving a total of 44 college students addressed the effects of intercomponent consistency on skill acquisition in a class of cognitively demanding tasks requiring rapid integration of information and rapid application of rules. The role of consistency of external stimulus-to-rule linkage in facilitating learning and performing…

To manipulate analytic and holistic thinking and their effects in learning, a study used visual and verbal processing modes combined with analytic and holistic learning strategies. Results showed that analytic information processing habits in college students may facilitate learning. (Author/JMK)

A study tested two alternative theories about the role of color in visual learning: first, that color provides an additional dimension of realism which results in the learner attaining a more complete image of the object or event and second, that color functions only as a coding device which facilitates the storage and retrieval of the image. Two…

Evidence is presented to demonstrate that arranging word lists on distinctive visual patterns results in better recall performance than does presenting the same word lists on a pattern that is always the same. Results of three experiments using college age students are reported. (Author/LMO)

Evolving from concern for the increasing requirements for literacy, especially visual literacy, the purpose of this study was to determine the impact of color on learning. Sixty midwestern college students were assigned to groups where they read and studied a graphic presentation, and then were tested on their recall and retention. The following…

Research has demonstrated that subjects are sensitive to both thematic and non-thematic information in pictorial stimuli. Three experiments were conducted to investigate memory for pictures under conditions of difficult foil discriminability and lengthy retention intervals. The foils differed from the studied persons in the number and quality of…

The effectiveness of elaborate visual cueing and reduced step size (i.e., increasing the number of visual cues) in facilitating student achievement on different instructional tasks was examined. The hypothesis proposed that instructional treatments utilizing reduced step size and elaborate visual cueing alone and in combination would be superior…

This study investigated the relationship of two anxiety measures (the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-Trait Form and the S-R Inventory of Anxiousness-Exam Form) to performance on a visual concept-learning task with embedded criterial information. The effect on anxiety reduction of cueing criterial information was also examined, and two levels of…

In order to compare the instructional effectiveness of realistic and non-realistic color cueing on visualized instruction, an instructional unit on the human heart, using slides and an audiotape, was presented to 244 college students. Four treatment groups received the same oral presentation, with the addition of different types of visual…

A growing interest among industrial and organizational psychologists is learning how to predict and maximize trainability. This study was conducted to examine the relationship between dimensions of cognitive style and perceptual mode as well as their association with a learning style instrument, explore the relationship between field…