Suggests that pictures offer equality of access to texts for all children, and provide an effective medium for promoting discussion and reflection. Finds that children are able to develop skills of metacognition through talking about a pictorial text--children as young as six are able to demonstrate their understandings of the reading process. (RS)

Visual and verbal literacy skills are crucial to children because of their relationship to reading, and to adults because of their social utility. Such skills are, paradoxically, among those least often developed in a systematic fashion in elementary schools. One reason for this is that component subskills of visual and verbal literacy are…

Four-, six- and eight-year-old children from an Evanston, Illinois school were the subjects for three experiments designed to evaluate the effects of color, complexity, movement, and incongruity on children's visual attention. Computer generated displays were used to: (1) assess developmental trends among the three age groups, (2) test a novel…

A study explored how children respond to visuals and how a program of visual literacy enhances oral and written response to pictures. The first and fifth grades of two schools, one urban and one suburban, with different socioecomic groups of students, were chosen to participate in a 1-year program consisting of one visual literacy lesson per week.…

Analyzes the research strategies, stimuli, subjects, statistical strategies, and relative variables in 34 empirical studies on children's representation of three-dimensional objects. The studies fell into three categories: children's representation of spatial relationships within an object, between two objects, and studies that included both. (MJP)