Understanding the relationship between cognitive processing and learner performance on tasks using digital media has become increasingly important as the transition towards online learning programs increases. Determining the impact of implementation of instructional resources is often limited to performance outcomes and comparisons to the status…

"In many ways, images are the vehicle of comprehension, thought, and action. We integrate parts of images, we remember images, we manipulate images." This quote from James E. Zull clarifies the rationale for a discussion protocol called Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), in which teachers focus students' attention on an image and ask…

Direct relationships between induced mutation in the "DCDC2" candidate dyslexia susceptibility gene in mice and changes in behavioral measures of visual spatial learning have been reported. We were interested in determining whether performance on a visual-spatial learning and memory task could be translated across species (study 1) and…

The growing interest in researching and documenting young children's perspectives and experiences, has led to an increasing use of visual methods, such as photographs and videos. Studies to date, however, have seen artifacts as neutral tools, and have not revealed the differences between the functions of visual artifacts in the research process,…

Guided looking, even done informally, has a huge impact on early childhood preparation for elementary school and is an effective way to address learning inequities. Why, therefore, does it play such a small role in schooling'? This is a question that occupied Philip Yenawine during his long career working in art museums, where the adults, once…

Visual representations are a familiar element of daily life and particularly beneficial as illustrations in science textbooks. In this case, learners draw on human dimensions such as cognitive style (CS) and prior knowledge (PK) when engaging in visual thinking. This study aimed to compare and explore the relationships among the format aspect…

Digital learning has become an inevitable trend with many benefits for students' learning performance and motivation. However, Virtual Reality, a pervasive mode of digital learning nowadays, has incurred ambivalence among teachers over the years due to its high cost and other technical concerns. Panoramic image VR (PIVR) is a cost-efficient…

Extracting the statistical regularities present in the environment is a central learning mechanism in infancy. For instance, infants are able to learn the associations between simultaneously or successively presented visual objects (Fiser & Aslin, 2002; Kirkham, Slemmer & Johnson, 2002). The present study extends these results by…

The Abstract Conceptual Feature (ACF) framework predicts that word meaning is represented within a high-dimensional semantic space bounded by weighted contributions of perceptual, affective, and encyclopedic information. The ACF, like latent semantic analysis, is amenable to distance metrics between any two words. We applied predictions of the ACF…

This study investigated how learning styles (visual/verbal) and the use of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) software affect English as a Second Language adult learners' improvement during a 12-week course focusing on pronunciation. In the control group (n = 28), the teacher corrected and gave feedback on the adult learners' pronunciation;…

Do students have preferred learning styles and, if so, can these preferences -- in addition to other abilities and attributes -- influence their performance in post-secondary education? There is a significant body of literature, across many disciplines, endeavouring to answer this question. In this paper, we examine a variant of this question with…

This article describes an inquiry-based classroom activity for strategic management, human resource management, and related courses to enhance the understanding of organizational culture. We use visual methods to provide fresh insights into an organization's culture from which we can enable students to draw conclusions upon how this culture might…

The authors explore how graphic novels can be used in the middle and high school social studies classroom to teach human rights. The article begins with a rationale on the benefits of using graphic novels. It next focuses on four graphic novels related to human rights issues: "Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds" (Speigelman…

Little is known about the educational experiences of deaf children in Mexico. Schools for the deaf exist, but no research has examined instructional practices for children in these contexts. In this study, we adopt a sociocultural framework for language acquisition to document and understand how teachers at a bilingual (Mexican Sign Language and…

Learning the words of a language is crucial to successful language learning. The study reported in this article aimed to investigate the potential for simple images to be used in foreign language vocabulary learning. English words presented in either first language form or simple pictorial form were used as cues for recall in classroom and…