Discusses the work of Helen Cowcher who writes and illustrates children's books dealing with conservation and ecology themes. Highlights include the use of color; involving teachers in the audience; career advice; and a list of titles with awards received. (LRW)

Presents an art lesson that incorporates self-portraits and a familiar art technique: coloring paper with crayons, covering the colors with a layer of black, and drawing through the black to reveal the hidden colors. Explains that the students must be expressive by using the colors or concentrating on their facial features. (CMK)

Previous research has shown that children systematically alter the size and colour of their drawings in response to the emotional character of the figures which they draw. However, these findings have been demonstrated only with children receiving mainstream Western education. This experiment was designed to investigate whether children receiving…

This study investigated the ability of color and motion to elicit and maintain visual attention in a sample of children with cortical visual impairment (CVI). It found that colorful and moving objects may be used to engage children with CVI, increase their motivation to use their residual vision, and promote visual learning.

Preschoolers' reasons for ranking the beauty of 30 children's book illustrations were investigated through individual interviews. Most frequent response criteria for beauty were associated with familiar objects or surroundings, action, color, clothing or accessories, water or ice, body features, and babies or small things. Children's book…

Two experiments explored the behavior of 20 Asian elephants ("Elephas aximus") in simultaneous visual discrimination tasks. In Experiment 1, 7 Burmese logging elephants acquired a white+/black- discrimination, reaching criterion in a mean of 2.6 sessions and 117 discrete trials, whereas 4 elephants acquired a black+/white- discrimination in 5.3…

Experiment 1 investigated the controlling properties of variability contingencies on choice between repeated and variable responding. Pigeons were exposed to concurrent-chains schedules with two alternatives. In the REPEAT alternative, reinforcers in the terminal link depended on a single sequence of four responses. In the VARY alternative, a…

Ninety-six participants, who were younger (20 years) or older (68 years) adults and either monolingual or bilingual, completed tasks assessing working memory, lexical retrieval, and executive control. Younger participants performed most of the tasks better than older participants, confirming the effect of aging on these processes. The effect of…

Uniform illumination levels in the classroom and focused brightness on the "teaching wall" made good sense for students in Henry Ford's era. If you were training to take your place on the assembly line, you needed to focus on the work at hand and ahead to your supervisor, but the future no longer belongs to students who look only straight ahead.…

This paper reports two experiments that investigated the role of verbal behavior in the emergence and generalization of contextually controlled equivalence classes. During both experiments, participants were trained with two different combinations of the same easily nameable, yet formally unrelated, pictorial stimuli. Match-to-sample baselines for…

In studies of function transformation, participants initially are taught to match stimuli in the presence of a contextual cue, X; the stimuli to be matched bear some formal relation to each other, for example, a relation of opposition or difference. In a second phase, the participants are taught to match arbitrary stimuli (say, A and B) in the…

Genetics is often a fascinating but difficult subject for middle level students. They can see the results of genes in every organism, but trying to visualize what happens at the level of genes is challenging for concrete thinkers. The author discusses an approach that helps students understand how genotypes can translate into phenotypes, then…

Selections of liquid aldehydes and ketones are proposed for students to determine what property is the best predictor of the color (yellow to red) of their 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazone derivative. Students may use a computer (spreadsheet or word processor) to analyze results. (Contains 1 table and 3 notes.)

Stroop dilution is the reduction of the Stroop effect in the presence of a neutral word. It has been attributed to competition for attention between the color word and neutral word, to competition between all stimuli in the visual field, and to perceptual interference. Five experiments tested these accounts. The critical manipulation was whether…

This study was undertaken to examine the impact of different color women's business suits on hiring decisions and perceptions of job applicants for two different types of jobs, one requiring warmth (elementary school teacher) and one requiring power (police officer). It was hypothesized that fictitious job applicants wearing dark, cold colors…