The study of infant communication during mother-infant interactions has largely focused on infants' distal behaviours, while neglecting their more proximal behaviours, such as touch. Yet, touch is an important modality through which infants and mothers communicate; it is also a vital means through which infants self-regulate and explore their…

This article presents a phenomenographic study that investigates students' approaches to achieving understanding. The results are based on interviews, addressing physiological phenomena, with 16 medical students in a problem-based curriculum. Four approaches--sifting, building, holding and moving--are outlined. The holding and moving approaches…

Background: Psychology and educational theory has a long tradition of research into learning styles. However, the current educational policy and practice interest in learning styles in the UK has resulted in concepts and practices being adopted with little rigorous empirical evaluation. Purpose: This small-scale, experimental study aimed to test…

This study aimed to investigate whether there is a relationship beween gender and learning style, mathematical achievement and attitude towards mathematics. The subjects of this study were 5th-semester students (42 females, 31 males) from the Mathematics Department at Anadolu University. The results of this study suggest that there were…

The commentary argues for an understanding of how texts are put together that accounts for multimodality and draws on children's ways of being and doing in the home, their "habitus". It focuses on identities as socially situated. It argues that it is important to trace the process of sedimenting identities during text production. This offers a way…

To examine the relationship between syntactic processes in language comprehension and language production, we compared structural persistence from sentence primes that speakers heard to persistence from primes that speakers produced. [Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: transient activation or implicit…

This article analyzes the attraction of stimulation produced by a visuotactile sensory substitution device, which was designed to provide optical information to infants who are blind via a tactile modality. The device was first tested on sighted infants, to demonstrate that this type of stimulation on the abdomen is pleasant and rewarding in…

Understanding the user and customizing the interface to augment cognition and usability are goals of human computer interaction research and design. Yet, little is known about the influence of individual visual-verbal information presentation preferences on visual navigation and screen element usage. If consistent differences in visual navigation…

The focus of this special issue is on the cognitive load underlying processes of interactive knowledge construction in a wide range of instructional multimedia platforms. Multimedia comprehension involves the parallel processing of auditory-verbal and visual-pictorial channels within working memory. By means of integrating multimodal information,…

This paper presents illustrative findings from a one-year pilot study undertaken in the English department of a high school in Singapore that was in the first year of implementing a one-to-one wireless laptop programme. The findings show that learning was often constrained by lecture-style presentations and overt test preparation. Despite…

This goal of this study was to examine the differences between lecturers and students' perceptions of the accessibility of instructional materials. The perceptions of 12 mature computing distance education students and 12 computing lecturers were examined using the knowledge elicitation techniques of card sorting and laddering. The study showed…

This study examined how middle school students constructed their understanding of the mitosis and meiosis processes at a molecular level through multimedia learning materials presented in different interaction and sensory modality modes. A two (interaction modes: animation/simulation) by two (sensory modality modes: narration/on-screen text)…

This researcher sought to investigate the relationship between perceptual learning modalities of fifth grade elementary school students and their compositional processes and products. Music composition, at the elementary school level, has been studied for many years, as the creation of new music can give students a more active role in learning,…

Faculty have a great deal of control over their lectures, lecture notes, and slides. This article discusses a coming wave of recording devices and other classroom technologies--this time wielded by the students--which will test this control and force serious conversations about how to best help students learn, what it means to own an idea, and…

Does the modality of instructional messages affect learning? How does it affect different media? In this paper, I offer an answer to these questions by first proposing a theoretical framework from which effective instructional methods can be derived. Then, I report a set of studies where one method, the modality principle, was tested across…