American high school students reflect their disinterest in school and classroom activities through increased disengagement and higher dropout rates. Narrowing our instructional strategies because of our increased focus on testing limits non-text-based activities at exactly the time when visual means dominate student learning. Approaching…

A series of interactive, instructional units have been developed that integrate computational molecular modelling and visualization to teach fundamental chemistry concepts and the relationship between the molecular and macro-scales. The units span the scale from atoms, small molecules to macromolecular systems, and introduce many of the concepts…

Visualization is becoming more prevalent as an application in science, engineering, and technology related professions. The analysis of static and dynamic graphical visualization provides data solutions and understandings that go beyond traditional forms of communication. The study of technology-based content and the application of conceptual…

jGRASP has three integrated approaches for interacting with its dynamic viewers for data structures: debugger, workbench, and text-based interactions that allow individual Java statements and expressions to be executed/evaluated. These approaches can be used together to provide a complementary set of interactions with the dynamic viewers. Data…

Studies have shown that students' understanding is typically analytic and not visual. Two possible reasons for this are when the analytic mode, instead of the graphic mode, is most frequently used in instruction or, when students or teachers hold the belief that mathematics consists simply of skillful manipulation of symbols and numbers. The…

Innovation is a key driver of organizational renewal and success. However, providing the right environment for innovative ideas to emerge and develop is not easy. This is further complicated by the fact that the professional environment is increasingly virtual as globally dispersed organizational and inter-organizational teams collaborate on…

This study provides an account of how architectural competencies are made visible in the work of critique in architectural education. It shows how critics enact a set of disciplined visual practices through which architectural qualities of proposed buildings become available for competent remark. Particularly prominent among these practices is the…

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…

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…

Advances in anatomical informatics, three-dimensional (3D) modeling, and virtual reality (VR) methods have made computer-based structural visualization a practical tool for education. In this article, the authors describe streamlined methods for producing VR "learning objects," standardized interactive software modules for anatomical sciences…

Thirty years of work as a graphic facilitator listening visually to people in every kind of organization has convinced the author that visual intelligence is a key to navigating an information economy rich with multimedia. He also believes that theory and disciplines developed by practitioners in this new field hold special promise for educators…

In an effort to better understand learning teams, this study examines the effects of shared mental models on team and individual performance. The results indicate that each team's shared mental model changed significantly over the time that subjects participated in team-based learning activities. The results also showed that the shared mental…

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…

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…