The London Pedagogy Planner (LPP) is a prototype for a collaborative online planning and design tool that supports lecturers in developing, analysing and sharing learning designs. The tool is based on a developing model of the components involved in learning design and the critical relationships between them. As a decision tool it makes the…

When the author started his visualization session at Brampton by showing a still from Kate Mackrell's "Kaleidoscope," he was immediately struck by one student's description of a symmetry and reflection line that was quite at odds with what he was holding. Since he had seen the whole thing moving on a number of occasions, the author was hanging on…

We describe a novel demonstration experiment for the visualization and measurement of standing sound waves in a tube. The tube is filled with equally spaced soap films whose thickness varies in response to the amplitude of the sound wave. The thickness variations are made visible based on optical interference. The distance between two antinodes is…

Inscriptions play a critical role in the creation and communication of scientific knowledge, yet are afforded little status in traditional science education research and practice. In the vast majority of science classrooms, K-12 and university alike, inscriptions are treated as transparent, unproblematic illustrations of the "content" rather than…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not the use of solid modeling software increases participants' success in solving a specified technical problem and how visualization affects their ability to solve a technical problem. Specifically, the study sought to determine if (a) students' visualization skills affect their problem…

This paper introduces a method for mining multiple-choice assessment data for similarity of the concepts represented by the multiple choice responses. The resulting similarity matrix can be used to visualize the distance between concepts in a lower-dimensional space. This gives an instructor a visualization of the relative difficulty of concepts…

Each year at Bath University the Open University's Centre for Mathematics Education runs a one-week summer school for Key Stage 3 teachers as well as those aspiring to become teachers. For many of the participants, the course is a case of dipping their toe in the water towards a longer-term goal of taking an Advanced Diploma (or perhaps a masters)…

Many Native American students have problems in traditional American schools, and the dropout rate of Native American students indicates this (Lomawaima, 1995; Rhodes, 1988). Researchers often point out that one reason students may encounter difficulties in school has to do with a school district's neglect for the learning style or culture of a…

This paper explores the role of diagrams and text in middle school students' understanding and visualisation of human body systems. We develop a common framework based on structure and function to assess students' responses across diagram and verbal modes. Visualisation is defined in terms of understanding transformations on structure and relating…

Background: Dyslexics read concrete words better than abstract ones. As a result, one of the major problems facing dyslexics is the fact that only part of the information that they require to communicate is concrete, i.e. can easily be pictured. Method: The experiment involved dyslexic third-grade, English-speaking children (8-year-olds) divided…

This study investigated how female elementary education pre-service teachers in the United States, Turkey and Taiwan learned spatial skills from structured activities involving discrete, as opposed to continuous, transformations in interactive computer programs, and how these activities transferred to non-related standardized tests of spatial…

Dynamic visualizations of scientific phenomena have the potential to transform how students learn and understand science. Dynamic visualizations enable interaction and experimentation with unobservable atomic-level phenomena. A series of studies clarify the conditions under which embedding dynamic visualizations in technology-enhanced inquiry…

The dissertation presents a theory of semantics and pragmatics for both language and vision. I focus on sentences including proper names, descriptions, and attitude report verbs, and on the Necker cube. I propose the Open Instruction Theory (OIT), according to which the linguistic meaning of a sentence and the semantic contribution of visual…

The article discusses problems that arise from comparing different kinds of presentation modes such as texts, pictures or animations with regard to learning outcome. These comparisons are confounded with or depend on other variables like quality of the instructional design, learning content, familiarity with the presentation mode as well as…

This paper presents the results of a study that was conducted to identify and document student perceptions of the effectiveness of computer modeling software introduced in a design foundations course that had previously utilized only conventional manually-produced representation techniques. Rather than attempt to utilize a production-oriented CAD…