Emerging from projects that have involved working with primary school children in school-related research, this article offers suggestions of how drawing as a principal means of data gathering can be either constructive or of little value. The qualitative research projects discussed include investigations of school improvement and consideration of…

In response to the wide-scale proliferation of "the cone of learning"--a fanciful retention chart confounded with Dale's Cone of Experience--the authors make four major claims debunking this fantasy and provide documentary evidence to support these claims. The first claim is that the data in the mythical retention chart do not make…

Critics have been attempting to debunk the mythical retention chart at least since 1971. The earliest critics, David Curl and Frank Dwyer, were addressing just the retention data. Beginning around 2002, a new generation of critics has taken on the illegitimate combination of the retention chart and Edgar Dale's Cone of Experience--the corrupted…

The authors are attempting to set the record straight regarding the sources frequently cited in the literature of the mythical retention chart and the corrupted Dale's Cone. They point out citations that do not actually connect with relevant works; provide correct citations of sources that are often cited erroneously; add references for overlooked…

Visual data differs from visual information since it must be recorded, analyzed, and manipulated in some manner, whereas visual information is primarily sensory input. Our environment is constantly infused with visual inputs, and it is sometimes difficult to make sense of them or to determine how best to deal with them for instructional purposes…

The rapid growth of research on Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) over the past decade has paid little attention to research methodology. This paper redresses this lack of attention to research methods and reports on a study conducted on children's personal experiences of Game Sense. The study focuses on the use of year six students'…

Jans, Peters, and De Weerd (2010) examined the studies demonstrating that spatial attention can be split across 2 noncontiguous target locations. They find all these studies to be flawed and conclude that spatial attention only selects a single location at any given time. They do, however, suggest that there could be exceptional circumstances that…

A previous study found that 5-year-old children of schizophrenic mothers were impaired on visual attention tasks as compared with controls. No difference was observed in 6-year-olds, however. This study reexamined the attentive behavior of some of these children 3 years later. (Editor)

This paper is an attempt toward the goal of developing an integrated quantitative theory of visual stimulus selection. (Author/RK)

The present study was designed to gather data relevant to the role of stimulus features as determinants of kind of emotion and the issue of differential information needs. (Author)

Heart rate indexes of reaction time (RT) were investigated in male college students. (Author)

Pigeons learned discrimination rapidly and responded differentially to pictures seen for the first time. The essential feature of a natural discrimination--which is the ability to cope with natural ranges of variation--was approached and earlier experimental results were extended using other classes of stimuli. (Author/RK)

Describes methodology and results of a study examining the role of layout and graphic design in the legibility of instructional text displayed on cathode ray tubes. This report includes a multidimensional scaling analysis, an analysis of the stimuli and independent variables, and labeling and dimensions using adjective and interview data. (MBR)

The work described demonstrated that not only do stimulus parameters have systematic effects upon brain activity as measured by the EEG, but that such effects have functional value and reflect aspects of efficiency. (Editor/RK)

The ability to decide rapidly that two visual stimuli are nominally the same when they are also visually the same (the Posner effect) was examined for stimuli of increasing visual complexity (Experiment 1) and when a greater variety of visual differences between the two stimuli was employed (Experiment 2). (Editor)