Comics-based /arts-based research is increasingly employed in anthropology and other social science disciplines. As part of my ongoing doctoral research on the experiences of young adults with learning disabilities in India, I have engaged in researcher-produced drawings/comics to depict my fieldwork findings. In this paper, I present three…

Jane Card's previous work on the power of images in conveying particular interpretations and her advice about how to use visual material effectively in classrooms will be familiar to readers of "Teaching History." In this article she focuses specifically on the capacity of visual representations to convey a compelling message about the…

Visual data--or visual sources of information--are a crucial part of helping students understand STEM concepts, improve their reading skills, and engage in science and engineering practices (Finson and Pedersen 2011). Indeed, many science and engineering practices require students to make meaning from visual data. When students are developing and…

This article describes "seductive details" as attention-grabbing, irrelevant pieces of information. They can be words, illustrations, photographs, animations, narrations, videos, or sounds. Studying the effects of seductive details is a growing area of research--but it is far enough along to merit teachers' interest: there are over 20…

Much like one's experiences with the wonders of the world, concrete and multiperspective representations of mathematical concepts are key to understanding. Ideally, "learning environments should give students the opportunity to get to know different representations of a mathematical object in order for them to develop an appropriate…

PicDiversity, Inc. is working to solve the problems about media in the classroom. Where do teachers go to find diverse media for their students? Students deserve to feel recognized and valued, seeing themselves reflected in the lessons provided. This article presents PicDiversity and how it can transform media in the classroom. PicDiversity's goal…

Nowadays, knowledge dissemination among children is no longer limited to the classroom and course or information books. It also includes websites explicitly addressed to youngsters who have a different stage of cognitive development and background knowledge compared to adults. However, they are also the first to live in today's multimodal…

Feynman diagrams are introduced in many physics textbooks, such as those by Alonso and Finn and Serway, and their use in physics education has been discussed by various authors. They have an appealing simplicity and can give insight into events in the microworld. Yet students often do not understand their significance and often cannot combine the…

Students often have difficulty learning from texts and lectures because information is commonly organized in blocks or lines that obscure important relationships among ideas. This article introduces graphic ways to display information so that relationships are apparent and easily learned.

Infographics exist on nearly any topic you can imagine, proliferating in the digital age with social media. As this genre continues to explode in the business scene, business and professional communication instructors can no longer ignore showing their students infographics. After first defining the genre and outlining how it situates itself…

Multimedia learning principle occurs when we create mental representations from combining text and relevant graphics into lessons. This article discusses the learning advantages that result from adding multimedia learning principle into instructions; and how to select graphics that support learning. There is a balance that instructional designers…

The wide-spread digital photography and computer use gave the opportunity for everyone to make three-dimensional pictures and to make them public. The new opportunities with three-dimensional techniques give chance for the birth of new artistic photographs. We present in detail the biological roots of three-dimensional visualization, the phenomena…

Photographs have always played a major role in geographical studies. Ever since the invention of photography in the 1830s, it has been assumed that photographs are perfectly suited to help answer that eminently geographical question, "what is this place like?". Photographs can convey a great deal of information about the appearance of a place far…

This article presents the author's comments on Robin Kelsey's "Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890," a book about government documents that happen to be visual materials. The word "archive" now has intellectual cache in the academic world, but its currency has little to do with the…

Conceptual change instruction recognizes that students bring personal, or naive, conceptions to the classroom, which they use to explain their world, interpret situations, and create meaning (Driver et al. 2007). But what happens when students' personal conceptions are inconsistent with experts' views of scientific knowledge? Even after direct…