There is a need to better understand the agentic choices that students make to communicate meaning through their multimodal compositions. Utilizing a case study approach, this article examines the composing of two first-grade students and discusses how these students utilized multimodal composing techniques from structured writing units during an…

Visual-verbal paired-associate learning (PAL) is thought to be related to reading acquisition and, more specifically, to word reading skills. To date, the uniqueness and strength of this relationship has remained unclear because most studies have been conducted in opaque orthographies such as English, and few studies have controlled for all of the…

Drawing from a multiple-case study of professional learning in literacy, this article presents vignettes from a Grade 1 classroom where the professional learning focused on multimodal literacy pedagogies that combined digital and print-based resources to expand children's meaning-making. Linking children's opportunities for expansive literacy…

The aim of this study was to examine if--and to what extent--a sensory modality's conceptual congruency influences learning in digital environments. Building on previous work in multimedia and embodied learning, the study used custom software to systematically vary the conceptual congruency of two sensory modalities (aural and bodily-kinesthetic).…

Background: With standardization ever squeezing creative curricula in K-1 classrooms, creating time for a play-based multimodal writing curriculum that leverages children's strengths as storytellers is revolutionary. Due in part to accountability policy pressures, print-based writing and verbocentric writing feedback are still often privileged in…

It has been well documented that oral language skills are precursors of the development of written abilities, meaning that improving oral language skills, e.g. vocabulary, listening comprehension, could have positive effects reading comprehension. The main aim of the present study was to analyze the effect of a training program focused on four…

The purpose of this study was to examine if student understanding of new material could be promoted by manipulating the perceptual factors experienced at the time of learning. It was hypothesized that the thematic relevance of perceptual factors would be a significant contributor to learner understanding. To test this hypothesis, one hundred…

Young children frequently tell visual stories, drawing pictures to record and share their thoughts, feelings and understanding. How and what young children describe through art, especially when written language is not an option, is the focus of this interpretive analysis. A series of pictures by John, a 6-year-old boy, were drawn across the…

Literate practice in the arts encompasses both aesthetics and creativity. It is also multimodal in nature and often collaborative. This article presents data collected from a small multi-age school, with children from Prep to Year 7, during their preparation for an end-of-year show. The children had studied the topics of conservation and…

Several experiments involving approximately 130 6-year-old children were conducted to examine the effects of overt illustration on first graders' learning from oral prose. In all experiments, experimental Ss heard prose selections after or during which they illustrated selection content with plasticized figure cutouts and background scenes while…

The Independence (Missouri) School District Title III Project is an inservice program for kindergarten and first grade teachers. The overall objective is to train the teacher to identify the child who needs help in developing the modalities necessary for all learning and for learning to read in particular. In the first year program, 88 teachers…