When too much visual stimuli is present, the phenomenon of clutter is known to degrade an individual's perception across a variety of domains, ranging from completing search tasks incorrectly, to decreasing reading speed when letters are too close together. However, research is lacking as to whether the negative effects of clutter impact learning…

There is a need to provide 21st century learning through mathematics textbooks. To give valuable input to such an effort, students' perspective needs to be considered since the students are the ones that get impacted from the effort. Therefore, the present study aims to describe students' perspective regarding the effort in integrating 21st…

To efficiently create books and other instructional content from videos and further improve accessibility of our course content we needed to solve the scene detection (SD) problem for engineering educational content. We present the pedagogical applications of extracting video images for the purposes of digital book generation and other shareable…

Nowadays, television programmes are not only accessed through a conventional TV set; they can be viewed through streaming services on the internet, smartphones, and tablets to name but a few media. For language learners, this development has opened up opportunities for accessing authentic materials in foreign languages outside of the classroom.…

This paper introduces a new captioning tool, Partial and Synchronized Caption with Hints (PSCH), as a means to facilitate second language (L2) listening by providing cues for ambiguous and difficult words/phrases in the caption while filtering out the easy words. Each word in the caption is synchronized to the corresponding audio to enable…

The field of education is undergoing fundamental change with the growing use of data. Fine-scale data collection at the item-response level is now possible. Xerox has developed a system that bridges the paper-to-digital divide by providing the well-established and easy-to-use paper interface to students, but digitizes the responses for scoring,…

This study proposes a method to detect problematic speech segments automatically for second language (L2) listeners, considering both lexical and acoustic aspects. It introduces a tool, Partial and Synchronized Caption (PSC), which provides assistance for language learners and fosters L2 listening skills. PSC presents purposively selected words…

Books designed for beginning readers typically intermix text with illustrations in close proximity. Prior research suggests this standard layout may reduce literacy skills due to increased attentional competition between text and illustrations. The current study extends this work by examining whether manipulations to the book layout can enhance…

Background: The area of research aimed for a more efficient e-learning is slowly widening from purely technical to the areas of psychology, didactics and methodology. The question is whether the text or background color influence the efficiency of memory, i.e. learning. If the answer to that question is positive, then another question arises which…

A study examined the graphic devices used on the front pages of 78 American newspapers with a circulation of 25,000 or more and explored editors' attitudes toward the importance of front page appearance and graphics to newspaper readers. Questionnaires were sent to the newspapers' staff members primarily responsible for front page layout and…

The influence of the German picture magazines and their editors and photographers on publisher Henry Luce and his staff during the early years of "Life" magazine has been overlooked. However, there is strong evidence in the Time, Incorporated, archive files indicating that the year Kurt Korff spent as a consultant to the company's newly…

Discusses the use of quantitative graphs in newspapers and identifies 10 common problems to avoid in the use of informational graphics, including (1) the tilted graph; (2) the stacked graph; (3) the convention-violating graph; (4) the unnecessarily three-dimensional graph; and (5) the overly complex graph. (MM)

An interview with W. Eugene Smith, well-known photographer and photographic essayist, is presented in this paper. The introductory section of the paper contains a biographical sketch of Smith and a discussion of his photographic essays on a number of topics, including World War II scenes, life in a Spanish village, the work of a black midwife in…

Argues for the analyzing, studying, and describing of text pages as configurations of columns and lines and as constallations of alphabets. (FL)

Using conversational analytic techniques, a study examined how and where editors placed news stories on the inner pages of newspapers. The editors of a Midwestern afternoon newspaper (30,000 circulation) with a strong liberal/progressive tradition had 10 of their conferences taped and transcribed. The transcripts were analyzed to isolate those…