This ethnographic multiple-case study examines how undergraduate students are socialized into the disciplinary norms, values, and practices of a geoscience course at a Canadian university. Transcending logocentric assumptions about academic discourse, this article advances a broader domain of inquiry----"multimodal academic discourse…

Purpose: This study examined the learning experiences of speech-language pathology students after creating three-dimensional (3D) anatomical models as part of an undergraduate Anatomy and Physiology course. Method: A total of 44 undergraduate students used 3D software programs to design anatomical components (e.g., larynx, brainstem, brain cortex,…

As multimodal texts become ubiquitous in the digital age, analyzing how writers interact with readers via visuals is becoming increasingly important. Enlightened by Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996, 2001) semiotic work, D'Angelo (2010) extended Hyland's (2000) text-based metadiscourse model and proposed a new framework for analyzing the visual…

This study was conducted to examine the effects of modality across gender on undergraduate student achievement when learning Algebra concepts. Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) and Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (CTML) provided a framework for this study to describe in depth the concept of the modality principle. Participants were undergraduate…

This study tested 3 instructor presence features in learning from video lectures: dynamic drawings, eye contact with the camera, and instructor visibility. In 2 experiments, college students watched a video lecture about the human kidney, which consisted of a series of drawings and a spoken explanation from the instructor, and then took a written…

PowerPoint presentations (PPTs) have become routine in medical colleges because of their flexible and varied presentation capabilities. Research indicates that students prefer PPTs over the chalk-and-talk method, and there is a lot of debate over advantages and disadvantages of PPTs. However, there is no clear evidence that PPTs improve student…

The complementary use of the theories of instrumental genesis and shifts of attention enabled me to obtain insights into students' understandings of the concepts of eigenvector and eigenvalue. My analysis suggests that the use of different dragging modalities can provide evidence of shifts in structure of a student's attention and consequently can…

Viewers who study photographs of scenes tend to remember having seen beyond the boundaries of the view ["boundary extension"; J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 15 (1989) 179]. Is this a fundamental aspect of scene representation? Forty undergraduates explored bounded regions of six common (3D) scenes, visually or haptically (while blindfolded)…