As graphically driven, animated, interactive applications offer educators new opportunities for shaping course content, new avenues for research arise as well. Along with these developments comes a need to study the effectiveness of the individual tools at our disposal as well as various methods for integrating those tools in a classroom setting.…

Visual literacy has been a function of human experience since the cave dwellers first created wall paintings. The contemporary definition of visual literacy extends literacy to include all the connotations of the word visual and encompasses perceptions developed from visual experience. The use of visual symbols together with written language…

Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests show that there is a rise in IQ measurement up to age 5 1/2, yet the IQ levels off and drops at age 8 1/2. The shift from unrestricted television viewing for preschoolers to the emphasis on verbal communication in school may be the cause. Visual languages within a symbolic system could be one method of…

How the Northeast Regional Center for the Deaf developed a program designed to teach middle-school aged children how to communicate using visual media. (Author)

Insights the author gained during the course of an educational development project in Latin America. (Author)

Photography, films, and other visual materials offer a different approach to teaching reading. For example, photographs may be arranged in sequences analogous to the ways words form sentences and sentences for stories. If, as is possible, children respond first to pictures and later to words, training they receive in visual literacy may help them…

Film making as a means of exposing public school students to the power of visual language. (Author)

Visual sequences should be the first visual literacy exercises for reasons that are physio-psychological, semantic, and curricular. In infancy, vision is undifferentiated and undetailed. The number of details a child sees increases with age. Therefore, a series of pictures, rather than one photograph which tells a whole story, is more appropriate…

Visual literacy, as used here, refers to the skills which let a person understand and use visuals to communicate his messages and interpret the messages of others. Visual literacy should be important in the curriculum because: 1) children pay more attention to movies and television than they do to teachers; 2) the plethora of visual information…

This study discusses a visual communications project designed to develop activities to promote visual literacy at the elementary and secondary school levels. The project has four phases: (1) perception of basic forms in the environment, what these forms represent, and how they inter-relate; (2) discovery and communication of more complex…

Presents an interpretation of the history of the development of visual and verbal language, and argues for the place of electronic technologies of visual and oral languages in the language arts curriculum. (DF)

A Title I 5 year Visual Literacy Experimental Program was initiated in four kindergarten classes during the 1972-73 academic year. The program was designed to focus on a hierarchy of visual skills and aesthetic experiences involving body language, graphic expressions, and photography, and to correlate these with the objectives of the classroom…

A series of articles examines visual literacy from the perspectives of definition, research, curriculum, and resources. Articles examining the definition of visual literacy approach it in terms of semantics, techniques, and exploratory definition areas. There are surveys of present and potential research, and a discussion of the problem of…

Studies described briefly in this paper indicate that use of cameras generates enthusiasm, develops self-concept, and increases communication skills. The content of the traditional ESL (English as a Second Language) materials is inadequate for dealing with either the syntactical or conceptual needs of (1) the silent child, (2) the child who can…

When students become actively involved in technology productions they develop learning skills, communication skills, and visual analysis skills, all of which are applied to real-life learning within the classroom curriculum. Students participate in all stages of the production projects, which proves to be motivating for the students and allows the…