CD-ROM storybooks, often referred to as electronic texts, e-books, and interactive stories, are learning tools with supplemental features such as automatic reading of text, sound effects, word pronunciations, and graphic animations which support the development of reading skills and comprehension in beginning readers. Some CD-ROM storybooks also…

Imagination might be understood as letting our senses, perceptions and sensibilities run free for no apparent reason. Here, for this special edition what might be "remarkable" is the "opening" of our imagination provided orally through storytelling. This opening involves the "placing" of our own and our listeners'…

Computer simulations and animations for developing statistical concepts are often not understood by beginners. Hands-on physical simulations that morph into computer simulations are teaching approaches that can build students' concepts. In this paper we review the literature on visual and verbal cognitive processing and on the efficacy of…

Figure/ground assignment--determining which part of the visual image is foreground and which background--is a critical step in early visual analysis, upon which much later processing depends. Previous research on the assignment of figure and ground to opposing sides of a contour has almost exclusively involved static geometric factors--such as…