This study examines how multilingual students (11-12 years) negotiate meaning in writing, drawing, and dialogues in science. Students use emotions, reflections, and experiences from areas other than school when given the opportunity to solve an open-ended task in science. Data consists of texts from three multilingual students and excerpts from…

Visuals in picturebooks play an important role in supporting children's reading comprehension and literacy development. This qualitative case study analyzes three American families' shared reading practices at home by analyzing their online surveys for family literacy environments, reading logs for a month, mother interviews, and video observation…

This qualitative within-individual case design study involved six adolescents (age 10-14 years) engaging in a think-aloud observational protocol to read two texts on climate change from contrasting viewpoints. The participants completed a prior knowledge assessment and survey of technology used to assess potential mediating factors. Survey and…

Children's early knowledge and skills set the stage for later reading development. The present studies examined children's conceptual knowledge of reading prior to formal literacy instruction. Young children's knowledge about who is able to read books and what readers are reading when they read books has been studied primarily through interviews.…

Two studies sought to replicate and extend the seductive effect of decorative pictures in expository text comprehension to an e-learning environment. In the first study, undergraduate students read and answered questions about two texts, with and without decorative, irrelevant images, in an e-learning course. The presence of decorative images had…

Educators and researchers consider vocabulary development foundational in young children's language and literacy learning and for academic achievement; adult-child shared book reading is potentially a rich site for word learning and concept development. In this article, we report on how an immigrant father and his four year old daughter, English…

This article explores 11-year-old children's connections to prior knowledge and experiences while reading a wordless version of "Little Red Riding Hood." The study extends pre-existing research on reader response theories by focusing on images instead of written text. The approach taken places emphasis on the reader's active engagement,…

Visual representations are a familiar element of daily life and particularly beneficial as illustrations in science textbooks. In this case, learners draw on human dimensions such as cognitive style (CS) and prior knowledge (PK) when engaging in visual thinking. This study aimed to compare and explore the relationships among the format aspect…

This study aimed to examine how different forms (still pictures vs. animations) of seductive illustrations impact text-and-graphic learning processes, perceptions, and outcomes. An eye-tracking experiment of three groups (static, dynamic, and control) was conducted with 60 college and graduate students while learning with PowerPoint slides about…

In this experiment, we contrasted two instructions in which the focus of summary writing was varied. We predicted that students would better understand a scientific text when they learn to focus their summaries on the referential content rather than on the hierarchical structure of the text. In a 2 × 2 factorial experiment, 85 Grade-10 students…

As part of a year-long, classroom-based research study examining literacy instruction and development, the research team observed emerging decoders draw from a range of semiotic resources while reading picturebooks. Utilizing a case study approach, the researchers selected eight first graders to act as a representative case, and examined their…

Research is not clear on how to address the difficulty students have conceptualizing geologic processes and phenomena. This study investigated how animations coupled with seductive details effect learners' situational interest and emotions. A quantitative quasi-experimental study employing an independent-measures factorial design was used. The…

Multimedia integration signals highlight correspondences between text and pictures with the aim of supporting learning from multimedia. A recent meta-analysis revealed that only learners with low domain-specific prior knowledge benefit from multimedia integration signals. To more thoroughly investigate the influence of prior knowledge on the…

The ability to flexibly allocate attention to goal-relevant information is pivotal for the completion of high-level cognitive processes. For instance, in comprehending illustrated texts, the reader permanently has to switch the attentional focus between the text and the corresponding picture in order to extract relevant information from both…

Biochemistry education relies heavily on students' ability to visualize abstract cellular and molecular processes, mechanisms, and components. As such, biochemistry educators often turn to external representations to provide tangible, working models from which students' internal representations (mental models) can be constructed, evaluated, and…