Diverse education professionals learned about African cultures in a workshop experience by making African masks using authentic symbolism. Analysis of reflections to evaluate the workshop for applicability to participants with and without African heritage showed that both groups expanded their cultural knowledge of traditional African ethnic…

The study reported here investigated the design and legibility of tactile thematic maps, focusing on symbolization and the comprehension of spatial patterns on the maps. The results indicate that discriminable and effective tactile thematic maps can be produced using classed data with a microcapsule paper production method. The participants…

Children with congenital deafblindness are a population of learners who may need intervention in order to develop symbolic understanding. They experience a combination of vision and hearing impairments that can affect how they make sense of the world, develop relationships, and understand symbols. In this article, the author reviewed a…

The article reports aspects of the evolution of a teaching approach over repeated trials for beginning symbolic algebra. The teaching approach emphasized the structural similarity between arithmetic and algebraic expressions and aimed at supporting students in making a transition from arithmetic to beginning algebra. The study was conducted with…

Advanced multimedia techniques offer significant learning potential for students. Dale (1946, 1954, 1969) developed a Cone of Experience (CoE) which is a hierarchy of learning experiences ranging from direct participation to abstract symbolic expression. This paper updates the CoE for today's technology and learning context, specifically focused…

The paper presents education as a process of human development toward becoming our authentic Selves and posits the Tarot hermeneutic as one of the means of holistic, spiritual education. As a system of images and symbols, Tarot encompasses the three I's represented by intuition, insight and imagination in contrast to the three R's of traditional…

This article examines how it is possible to use the aesthetic process to enrich teaching practices in preschool and elementary school education. What is under scrutiny is the aesthetic dimension of a core curricular subject, the ultimate goal being to achieve an understanding of curricular content through aesthetic learning processes. For this…

Young children are surrounded by environmental print on a daily basis. Through their visual exploration of environmental print, coupled with sociocultural experiences, children gain valuable semantic and symbolic knowledge as they make sense of their world. The aim of this review is to examine the question of whether environmental print has value…

This article used two studies to investigate sign and symbol mediation in children aged 8-11 years. In role play, children exist at one at the same time in objective reality and their representation of reality. We cannot observe their mental representation directly, but the issue of whether signs or symbols mediate early role play is an important…

The present research examines the ability of children as young as 4 years to use models in tasks that require scaling of distance along a single dimension. In Experiment 1, we found that tasks involving models are similar in difficulty to those involving maps that we studied earlier (Huttenlocher, J., Newcombe, N., & Vasilyeva, M. (1999). Spatial…

Background: Recently, symbols have been used to increase understanding of written information for people with intellectual disabilities, yet the effectiveness of this remains largely untested. This study was undertaken around the time of an election and it aimed to test whether a symbol-based manifesto increased the understanding of this material…

Mother-child conversations about pictures systematically differ from mother-child conversations about objects: Pictures are more likely than objects to elicit talk about kinds, whereas objects are more likely than pictures to elicit talk about individuals. The purpose of the current study is to examine whether this difference between pictures and…

All educators should be concerned about curriculum. Curriculum is the path to giving students the best possible education enveloping an in-depth learning experience. Dr. Kritsonis's "Ways of Knowing Through the Realms of Meaning" provides a guide for schools to select curriculum that is appropriate, rigorous, and enriched. Through alignment, Dr.…

Improving academic achievement is at the heart of college and university fund development. It has become increasingly important for fundraisers in educational settings to find innovative means to improve educational opportunities by increasing the institution's financial resources. The purpose of this article is to discuss the benefits of…

College students (N=95) rated 200 blissymbols for their inherent guessability (transparency) and amount of perceived perceived relationship between the symbol (translucency) and the symbol's meaning (gloss). Results indicated that although blissymbols are low in iconicity they are relatively translucent and that translucency is related to…