The effects of visual grouping strategies involving animated and static graphic presentations on learning were studied. Also studied was the ability of students to learn a scientific rule presented incidentally in an animated sequence in the hope of replicating results from previous research. A total of 39 fourth graders participated in an…

Speedback is a continuous audience response technology system that was used to test concepts and variable relationships that had been derived earlier from large-sample, survey research methodology. Continuous audience response technologies used computer hardware and customized software to collect subjects' reactions to stimuli, usually videotaped…

To determine how procedural instructions comprised of text and pictures are comprehended and executed, a research review focused on (1) differences in comprehension and performance attributable to variations in the information's organization, (2) the format of the information, (3) the metacognitive strategies employed by the readers, and (4) the…

In a study that was conducted to measure performance as a function of multimedia instructions, 360 college students in a University of Colorado introductory psychology course were taught to build a model helicopter from an assembly kit. Their instructions consisted of either viewing a narrated film (one or two viewings), or hands-on practice using…

Rock videos have their antecedents in film and television images, although music in films is usually background music. Television made possible the live transmission of musical numbers with visuals. The musical television commercial is an amalgam of conventions, with background music suddenly erupting into text, unheard by the characters but…

The nature of the learner-machine interaction is of central importance in the design of guided discovery learning environments. The interface to a learning environment is the only way in which a learner has access to the functionality of the system, and conversely, the interface in the only way in which the tutoring component of the system has…

For the dyslexic and others with similar problems, a revision of the sequence of modalities known as VAKT (for visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile) might achieve more effective and more rapid remediation. The new sequence is designated as TAK/v. The subordination of the visual modality is based on the recent identification of visual processing…

Individual differences in fourth grade students' abilities to profit from experimenter-provided picture adjunct aids on prose recall tasks were examined. It was hypothesized that poor paired associate learners would benefit from picture adjunct aids to a greater extent than good paired associate learners. A secondary aim was to assess the effects…

The COMPIC Development Association, an organization based in Victoria, Australia, has developed techniques for publishing pictographic materials for use by individuals with severe communication impairments. The COMPIC (Computer Pictographs for Communication) system comprises a method of electronically publishing customized communication aids and…

A study consisting of two experiments attempted to further adapt the visual preference procedure for determining children's meaningful phonological perception. In the first experiment, 1-year-olds were presented with auditory stimuli (words) and screens containing paired color photographs of the object described by each word and of an unusual…

Sixty beginning first-grade students in an urban school district in South Carolina participated in a study investigating the relationship between representational competence and the ability to perform first-grade learning tasks. Representational competence may be defined as the ability to use representations of reality (such as pictures, symbols,…

This study compared the conceptual rule learning performance of normal and learning disabled children. Subjects for the study were 18 normal and 18 learning disabled children with mean ages of 9.4 and 9.3 years and mean IQ scores of 103.1 and 101.6 respectively. The children were matched for age, IQ, sex and race. Four types of rules (affirmation,…

This paper presents a study of the looking and looking away or gaze alternation behavior of both full term and preterm infants in the presence of varying degrees of facial animation. The faces used in the study included, in increasing order of animation, a Raggedy Ann doll's face, a moving and talking doll's face, a mother's less animated face…

Recent research projects demonstrate that pictures in reading textbooks have a negative effect on the word-decoding ability of young readers. This particular study questioned whether the relative difficulty of the words being read determines the effect that pictures have on good, normal, and poor readers. After pretesting to determine reading…