Introduction: Recent trends in training teachers of students who are blind or have low vision (i.e., those who are visually impaired) have shifted away from traditional hand-over-hand guidance and toward a hand-under-hand approach. However, a search for peer-reviewed studies that address the effects of the use of hand-under-hand versus…

This study aimed to investigate whether the presence (when using physical manipulatives [PMs]) or absence (when using virtual manipulatives [VMs]) of haptic sensory feedback (i.e., open-ended haptic manipulation of physical materials with the use of the hands) during experimentation can impact preschoolers' conceptual understanding of concepts…

The hands often serve as the eyes and ears of children who are deaf-blind. The hand-under-hand technique involves gently placing your hands underneath or alongside the hands of a child with deaf-blindness to help them explore and engage with the world around them. When used effectively, the hand-under-hand technique provides respectful, tactile…

We evaluated a method for teaching children with autism spectrum disorder to respond to tactile stimulation of multiple body parts. Various objects (e.g., hairbrush) produced the sensations (e.g., prickly). In a multiple baseline design across participants, participants learned 9 sensation body part tacts and the evaluation concluded with tests of…

Previous psychological, neuroscientific, and educational research indicates that a focus on individual haptic modes of learning (touch, body movement, gesture, tracing), and on the development of emerging mathematical and scientific drawing, can enhance children's learning in mathematics and science. However, most of these studies have focused on…

Structural reasoning is a combined ability to "look for structures, recognize structures, probe into structures, act upon structures, reason in terms of general structures, and see how a piece of knowledge acquired resolves a perturbation experienced" (Harel and Soto, 2017). The purpose of this study was to explore the cognitive…

Tactile graphics convert visual information into touchable patterns and braille, providing an essential solution for accessible graphics for individuals with visual impairments. Pioneering research advocates for the potential of audio-augmented tactile graphics, which convey complex information through auditory and tactile modalities rather than…

The concept that multisensory observation and drawing can be effective for enhancing anatomy learning is supported by pedagogic research and theory, and theories of drawing. A haptico-visual observation and drawing (HVOD) process has been previously introduced to support understanding of the three-dimensional (3D) spatial form of anatomical…

The present study evaluated a systematic instructional package including the system of least prompts (SLP) to teach differentiation and selection of tangible symbols to continue activities for two children with complex support needs and deafblindness (DB). A multiple probe design across three symbols was used to evaluate the intervention package…

Students with visual impairment have the same range of mental abilities as their sighted peers. However, these students experience academic failure, especially in courses in which visual themes are dominant, as they cannot use their sense of sight to process information sufficiently. One of the courses that students with visual impairment have the…

Teaching tact and intraverbal responses based on function-feature-class to children with language delays can result in the emergence of untrained relational responses. The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of compound stimuli in discriminated operants (i.e., different combinations of hear, see, touch, and taste) on the acquisition…

Benefits of synchronous presentation of multisensory compared to unisensory cues are well established. However, the generality of such findings to children's learning with visual and haptic sensory cue pairings is unclear. Children aged 6 to 10 years (N = 180) participated in a novel tabletop category-learning paradigm with visual, haptic, or…

Ariadne is a touch-based program for the learning of homotopies of paths, without the use of formalism, by building mental models. Using Ariadne, the user can construct points, paths by dragging points and homotopies by dragging paths as well as compute winding numbers of paths, all on a variety of surfaces, through touch gestures. Ariadne…

Embodied cognition theories view sensorimotor activity as fundamental to learning, knowing, and reasoning. To investigate the role of physical movement in conceptual learning, we developed and explored an Embodied Learning Interactive Chemistry environment (ELI-Chem). The ELI-Chem learning environment includes a computer simulation, a device for…

The geologic method of stratigraphy which studies the structure of the earth by making layers was employed with 3D laser cutting techniques to make more easily defined tactile regions in templates of cells, tissues and anatomic regions containing muscles and bones. Templates were made audio responsive by hand-drilling a small hole in a template…