The purpose of this action research was to facilitate reading comprehension of read-alouds in students with the most significant cognitive disabilities. Grade-level read-alouds were paired with manipulatives (real objects) that represented the stories read. Students were assessed after reading, and the results between instances when manipulatives…

To succeed in STEM, students need to learn to use visual representations. Most prior research has focused on conceptual knowledge about visual representations that is acquired via verbally mediated forms of learning. However, students also need perceptual fluency: the ability to rapidly and effortlessly translate among representations. Perceptual…

This study aimed to analyze the gender sensitivity of English grade 9 material through evaluation of texts and pictorial presentations. In addition, it modified the grade 9 material tasks through localization and contextualization of the investigated gender-insensitive texts and pictures. This assessed as well, the acceptability of the modified…

This article presents information on instructional strategies and the effective use of personnel needed for educating students with dual sensory impairments in integrated learning environments. To counter the practice of educating students in separate environments according to their most apparent weaknesses and limitations, the authors contend…

Objective: The goal of the present study was to examine distributed attentional functions in long-term but currently abstinent methamphetamine (MA) abusers using a task that measures attentional alertness, orienting, and conflict resolution. Methods: Thirty currently abstinent MA abusers (1 month-5 years) and 22 healthy non-substance using adults…

"Chills" (frisson manifested as goose bumps or shivers) have been used in an increasing number of studies as indicators of emotions in response to music (e.g., Craig, 2005; Guhn, Hamm, & Zentner, 2007; McCrae, 2007; Panksepp, 1995; Sloboda, 1991). In this study we present evidence that chills can be induced through aural, visual, tactile, and…

Teaching students to use and interpret representations in science is critically important if they are to become scientifically literate and learn how to communicate their understandings and learning in science. This study involved 248 students (119 boys and 129 girls) from 26 grade 6 teachers' classes in nine primary schools in Brisbane,…

Load theory predicts that concurrent cognitive load impairs selective attention. For visual stimuli, it has been shown that this impairment can be selective: Distraction was specifically increased when the stimulus material used in the cognitive load task matches that of the selective attention task. Here, we report four experiments that…

In an experimental paradigm adapted from Hari (1995), forty observers listened via headphones to 8 binaural clicks: 4 left-ear leading followed by 4 right-ear leading with either 38 or 140 ms interstimulus intervals (ISIs). Concurrently, they viewed either foveal or peripheral visual stimuli designed to activate either the parvocellular or…

The goal of this study was to evaluate the claim that young children display preferences for auditory stimuli over visual stimuli. This study was motivated by concerns that the visual stimuli employed in prior studies were considerably more complex and less distinctive than the competing auditory stimuli, resulting in an illusory preference for…

This study replicated and extended Wright (2006) and Whitehurst, Ironsmith, and Goldfein (1974) by examining whether preschool aged children would increase their use of passive grammatical voice rather than using the more age-appropriate active grammatical construction when the former was modeled by an adult. Results showed that 5 of the 6…

We report 2 experiments that tested the effects of multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) across training sets on the emergence of productive autoclitic frames (suffixes) for 6 preschoolers with and without language-based disabilities. We implemented multiple exemplar tact instruction with subsets of stimuli whose "names" contained the suffix "-er"…

In this paper, we propose a social semiotic approach to studying PowerPoint in university classrooms. Our approach is centred on two premises: (1) PowerPoint is a semiotic technology that can be integrated into the pedagogical discourse of classrooms, and (2) PowerPoint technology encompasses three interrelated dimensions of social semiotic…

Conceptual combinations may be interpreted by 3 main strategies: by attributing a feature of the modifying (head) noun into the modified noun (property interpretation); by establishing a relation between the 2 concepts (relational interpretation); or by combining properties of both nouns into a concept with new identity (hybridization). There…

Previous studies have proposed that humans may be born with mechanisms that attend to conspecifics. However, as previous studies have relied on stimuli featuring human adults, it remains unclear whether infants attend only to adult humans or to the entire human species. We found that 1-month-old infants (n = 23) were able to differentiate between…