Silos are an undeniable and unavoidable reality of knowledge production, particularly within academia. For those who choose to navigate between disciplinary boundaries, as opposed to within them, it is not uncommon to find similar concepts developing in parallel in two or more completely different fields of study. These silos tend to be not just…

The multi-disciplinarity of visual literacy has become even more pronounced in an age of digital information. What shared questions do we ask in our research, where does our work intersect and how do those intersections define the field of visual literacy? Through an analysis of the articles published in the "Journal of Visual Literacy"…

The "collegium" learning community teaches mid-career graduate students intentionally to prepare for and create learning opportunities for their undergraduate students, what the authors call "teaching on purpose." The design addresses the lack of alignment between research on learning and preparation of faculty for teaching,…

Biochemistry instructors are inundated with various representations from which to choose to depict biochemical phenomena. Because of the immense amount of visual know-how needed to be an expert biochemist in the 21st century, there have been calls for instructors to develop biochemistry students' visual literacy. However, visual literacy has…

This paper presents and illustrates a framework for synthesis of research and theory on human characteristics, and relates that framework to the concerns of individuals working in the visual literacy area. The framework presented casts learner characteristics into four general types, derived from two primary dimensions: stability/change and…

Likert-type rating scales were designed and used to help college students perceive, understand, and value the beauty and content of a piece of art. The subjects for the project were 100 college students enrolled in two art appreciation courses at Texas College. Their classification ranged from freshman to senior, with majors mainly in business,…

It is proposed that visual literacy be defined as the ability to understand (read) and use (write) images and to think and learn in terms of images. This definition includes three basic principles: (1) visuals are a language and thus analogous to verbal language; (2) a visually literate person should be able to understand (read) images and use…

This study undertook an examination of how specific rhetorical training in visual literacy would improve the ability of college freshmen to clearly state a thesis, to carefully shape an argument, to deliberately substantiate the argument with examples, and to skillfully express ideas with appropriately varied sentence structure. The hypotheses…

The purposes of this study are to develop a method by which a symbolic mode in general and a particular mode, filmmaking, can be studied and to present a demonstration of this method and the results of this particular analysis. Eight groups of teenagers, males and females, were taught to make films using 16mm equipment. The students came from four…

Learning research in visuals and media from education is reviewed, summarized, and extrapolated for the planetarium. Of particular interest is research into the use of cuing, with relevance to the planetarium display. It has been demonstrated that viewers can learn more if they are told about the important concepts and terms before the planetarium…

This study was designed to answer the following questions relative to social science fair projects: (1) To what extent were instructional media techniques utilized in the project display? (2) To what extent did teachers assist students with topic selection for the projects? (3) To what extent were the teachers and media specialists involved with…

For the twenty-ninth year, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the National AECT Convention in Orlando, Florida. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…