While it is hypothesized that providing instruction based on individuals' preferred learning styles improves learning (i.e., reading for visual learners and listening for auditory learners, also referred to as the "meshing hypothesis"), after a critical review of the literature Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork (2008) concluded that…

How can cognitive load in visual displays of computer simulations be optimized? Middle-school chemistry students (N = 257) learned with a simulation of the ideal gas law. Visual complexity was manipulated by separating the display of the simulations in two screens (low complexity) or presenting all information on one screen (high complexity). The…

Examines the hypothesis that some people are verbal learners and some people are visual learners. Presented a battery of 14 cognitive measures related to the visualizer-verbalizer dimension to 95 college students and then conducted correlational and factor analyses. Results have implications for how to conceptualize and measure individual…

The effect of labels influences nursery school children to process or store information about associated pictures more effectively than they would have done in the absence of labels. (Author/DEP)

Presents research on and discusses the redundancy effect, consistent with a dual-channel theory of multimedia learning in which adding on-screen text can overload the visual information-processing channel, causing learners to split their visual attention between two sources. In research, lower transfer performance also occurred when interesting…

Possible interactions of individual learning differences and mode of presentation were investigated in college students. Individual differences in learning were found to be reliable and just as predictable across as within modalities. Subjects could not be reliably classified in terms of auditory-visual preference scores. (Author/BH)

Evidence is presented to demonstrate that arranging word lists on distinctive visual patterns results in better recall performance than does presenting the same word lists on a pattern that is always the same. Results of three experiments using college age students are reported. (Author/LMO)

Children at three age levels (four-, six-, and eight-year-olds) were asked a series of class inclusion questions presented verbally, visually, and kinesthetically. Analysis of correctness of reasons showed main effects of age and of condition. (Author/GK)

Examines whether teaching poor text comprehenders reading strategies will improve reading comprehension. Third through fifth grade adequate decoders who were poor comprehenders were trained for 10 weeks in either a verbally or visually based reciprocal teaching program. Results reveal that training reading comprehension strategies in small groups…

Investigates the cues beginning readers use in recognizing verbal stimuli. (Author/DEP)

The keyword method helped elementary school children learn Spanish vocabulary, especially when they were provided with relevant visual images. The Spanish word was associated with an English keyword sounding like the foreign word, and the picture illustrated some interaction between the keyword and the English translation. (GDC)

English-speaking college students (n=103) enrolled in a German course read a German story presented by a computer program which allowed them to choose a verbal or visual (picture or video clip) translation. Students remembered word translations better when they saw both annotations. Implications for a theory of multimedia learning are discussed.…

In 3 experiments, 163 college students who read a summary with a sequence of short captions with simple illustrations depicting steps in a process recalled the steps and solved transfer problems as well as or better than students who received the full text with a summary or alone. (SLD)