Recent research indicates that Americans are reading less than they have in the past, as black-and-white text competes with more visually exciting media, such as the Internet, movies, and television. As a solution to this problem, the author proposes that books and instructional materials engage readers visually through the use of color and…

In this article, the author narrates how her son's communication skills have progressed through the use of photographic visuals. Her son, Ryan, was diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) when he was aged two years and seven months. At this time he was unresponsive to his name, had virtually no words and definitely no comprehension of…

Memory and information processing were studied with public school students, aged 10-15, who had educable mental handicaps (n=60), trainable mental handicaps (n=60), and no mental handicaps (n=60). Study participants completed a picture recall and relocation test, in order to determine if differences existed between the groups based on…

Most children's books are filled with pictures, yet when schools design curricula to teach writing, they often ignore the role of visual images in the writing process. Historically, methods for teaching writing have focused on text. Even relatively recent techniques like brainstorming and story webbing still focus on verbal information. In some…

This booklet is geared towards persons with autism of all ages who would benefit from enhancing their communication systems through the use of aided communication. It recognizes the importance of an effective expressive communication system to aid them in expressing thoughts and maintaining some power and control over decisions in their lives.…

This paper discusses how presentation software can be used to design custom materials for a variety of people with special needs, including children and adults with low vision, people with developmental disabilities, and stroke patients with cognitive impairments. Benefits of using presentation software include: (1) presentation software gives the…

A study investigated the language transfer hypothesis in the specific area of second-language spelling. Data collected from 84 secondary school students learning Spanish as a second language show that in general, performance in English spelling is the best predictor of performance in Spanish spelling. Other variables included performance on a…

Because analyses of reaction-time data are sensitive to aberrant observations and violations of statistical assumptions, a new approach is suggested. In this empirical approach, one applies the same criteria to the problem of selecting a statistical method as one uses to select among alternative experimental procedures. Six criteria are presented…

A study examined aspects of the acquisition of spatialized morphology and syntax in American Sign Language (ASL) learned natively by deaf children of deaf parents. Children aged 2 to 8 were shown story books to elicit narratives, and the resulting use of verbs contained morphological forms not appearing in adult grammar. Analysis of the creative…

The articles in this journal focus on the teaching of composition at the secondary and college levels. Separate articles deal with the causes of poor proofreading by students and methods for teaching proofreading skills; the use of folklore as an aid to teaching composition; techniques for overcoming students' fear of failure in the writing…

To determine whether students gain more knowledge and stronger impressions from reading a play or from viewing the play on videotape, two groups of college students were presented with an excerpt from Arthur Miller's "Incident at Vichy." One group was to read the excerpt and the other group was to view the same excerpt from a public…

The impact of news film on children's learning was investigated by presenting 193 fifth, seventh, ninth, and eleventh grade students with one of two versions of a newscast. The children viewed a videotape of a newscaster introducing film reports of six stories or listened to the newscaster reading the news stories. The children provided responses…

THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE OPTIMAL COMBINATION OF STIMULI AND THEIR TIMING FOR LARGE INCREASES IN RECOGNITION VOCABULARY IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE AFTER STUDENTS HAVE MASTERED THE BASIC STRUCTURE OF THE LANGUAGE WAS THE SUBJECT OF RESEARCH UNDERTAKEN WITH STUDENTS ENROLLED AT THE GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS. FOLLOWING A…

THE RELATIVE EFFECTIVENESS OF EIGHT TYPES OF VISUAL ILLUSTRATION OF THE HUMAN HEART WAS TESTED IN NINTH THROUGH TWELFTH GRADE CLASSES. THE EIGHT TYPES--ABSTRACT LINE DRAWINGS, DETAILED SHADED DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS OF HEART MODELS, AND REALISTIC MODELS, EACH IN BLACK AND WHITE AND IN COLOR--AND A CONTROL PRESENTATION WITH NO ILLUSTRATIONS WERE…

Two experiments studied the influence of an individual's cognitive style on concept identification. Subjects were high school males, classified into levels of cognitive style according to their performance on the Hidden Figures Test. For the first experiment, three non-overlapping groups of 30 each were required to classify figural patterns, which…