Achieving an in-depth understanding of unfamiliar science concepts has been found to be difficult when learners can not index science language to relevant sensorimotor experiences. Ongoing research in embodied cognition highlights the importance of relevant sensorimotor experiences in understanding and learning new information. Aiming to foster…

For literacy educators, there is a need to understand students' pathways into composition and mediate contemporary, multimodal compositional pathways with more academic ones. In an effort to mediate between middle and high school students' schooling and curricular demands and their everyday interests and investments in media and communicational…

The goals for engaging students in peer learning range from positioning students as knowledgeable others to promoting social-emotional learning goals to providing contexts in which students can articulate and compare their thinking to supporting opportunities to cogenerate solutions to complex problems. There are a number of complexities…

In light of emerging technologies prompting new avenues for teaching and learning, students are positioned to "create" to learn, with video production being an important process for literacy development. There is a growing need for innovative instructional practices in reading and writing that are aligned with student interests and the activities…

Good learning experiences ask students to investigate and make sense of the world. While there are many ways to do this, K-12 curriculum has traditionally skewed toward reading and writing to interpret and express students' sense-making. But there is another way. Infographics represent data and ideas visually, in pictures, engaging more parts of…

We used a grounded theory approach to investigate and describe the learning of middle school students when they carry out mathematical activities (in the classroom or out of it) and explore mathematical objects and relations using mobile phones. We found that a web of conditions and consequences could be related to the students' learning when they…

The nature of literacy is changing. Increased student use of computer-mediated, digital, and visual communication spans our understanding of adolescent multi-modal capabilities that reach beyond the traditional conventions of linear speech and written text in the science curriculum. Advancing technology opens doors to learning that involve…

This study examined how middle school students constructed their understanding of the mitosis and meiosis processes at a molecular level through multimedia learning materials presented in different interaction and sensory modality modes. A two (interaction modes: animation/simulation) by two (sensory modality modes: narration/on-screen text)…

The authors examine how to assess multimodal reading practices with a group of middle school students attending an elementary school in Eastern Canada. They argue that to assess new reading practices, we need a fine-grained account of what students do, when they do it, with whom, why they do it, and finally, where they go in web space. The authors…