Infographics are appearing in children's magazines, picture books, and informational texts. Understanding, and ultimately creating, these complex visual representations of information or data requires higher level thinking skills to analyze and understand how the text and graphics work together to convey meaning. The authors provide a framework…

This article explores the use of visual tools--maps, diagrams, graphic organizers, and illustrations that link two or more ideas together in a conceptual manner--and how they are commonly used in deaf education. Visual tools improve the quantity and quality of learning in language, science, and mathematics across all ages and all groups of deaf…

Preferences for solution methods have an important implication teaching and learning mathematics and students' mathematical performances. In the domain of learning mathematics, there are two modes of processing mathematical information: verbal logical and visual-pictorial. Learners who process mathematical information using verbal logical and…

Comics and cartoons are valued in twenty-first century popular culture and are increasingly used as 'Applied Comics' to help communicate key messages and information in society. However, there is less evidence of cartoons and comics being used to communicate with and engage library users in learning, information literacy (IL) and research support.…

Connecting with text-weary students can be a challenge in the online instructional environment. Librarians have often developed screencast videos and integrated screenshots into online learning objects to teach students basic research skills. An alternative technology, graphical interchange format (GIF), may prove to be an excellent blend of the…

The International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, recently established by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is an alleged attempt at public outreach. The NSF encourages scientists to submit visualizations that would appeal to non-expert audiences by displaying their work in an annual "special feature" in "Science" magazine,…

Despite a decline in popularity within US society, posters continue to hold a prominent place within middle and high school science classrooms. Teachers' demand is satisfied by governmental and non-profit science organizations that produce and disseminate posters as tangible products resulting from their research, and instruments to communicate…

This article reports on the incorporation of visual material as a tool for learning sociology and discusses a poster assignment introduced as a means of assessment in an academic context committed to innovative learning strategies and to teaching and learning enhancement. The article draws on an evaluation of using the poster assignment to assess…

People find difficulty in performing syllogistic reasoning. This paper outlines some reasons for poor syllogistic reasoning. Representational systems (RS) used in presenting and evaluating syllogisms can be distinguished in terms of attributes such as specificity, expressiveness, and abstraction. Graphical RSs have pedagogical potential because of…

Few beginners find learning to program easy. There are many factors at work in this phenomenon with some being simply inherent in the subject itself, while others have more to do with deficiencies in learning methods and resources. As a result, many programming environments, software applications, and learning tools have been developed to address…

The primary research problem confronting many experimental researchers is finding valid stimulus (instructional) and criterial (testing) materials that operationally fit their hypotheses. Five experimental studies have been completed, and two are in progress, using the Dwyer instructional materials to address the problem of finding valid…

This paper addresses the scarcity of research on depictions and layout in sex education materials. It is argued that pictures and layout can inform an analysis of social stratification based on visual access. This process of social organization is located using four theoretical models. However these models do not lend themselves to a close reading…

Production of an interactive videodisc containing 1981 slides and about 34 minutes of videotape on the topic of orthopedics for physical therapy is described, with attention given to instructional design considerations and the process of producing an interactive program. The videodisc method is seen as optimizing visual learning. (Author/MSE)

The purpose of this paper is to sensitize instructional message designers to the stereotypical signals which may be inherent in computer clip-art selections. A rationale is presented for the power of message design, and the differences between gender equality and gender equity are discussed. Several computer clip-art libraries were analyzed, and…

This study, to determine whether complexity of detail, scale, and background help subjects to learn technical information, demonstrated no significant difference between groups. One group used the existing self-contained learning package with many complex visuals; the other group used lessons identical in the audio portion but containing…