Students are often unmotivated to engage with their online coursework. Research has shown that concretely visualizing one's goals (e.g., photo-taking) can improve motivation to learn. This study explored the effect of taking a photo of one's study space (i.e., a "studygram" photo similar to a post on Instagram) on students' motivation to…

Photomicrographs are representations of small-scale entities. It has been long argued that students can be weak in perceiving microscopic entities compared to macroscopic entities. However, only a small body of research has investigated how students utilise photomicrographs to make sense of biological phenomena. This study uses a theoretical…

Background: Photomicrographs are major biological representations which help students understand more about the structures of cells and tissues. Owing to their abstract nature, students often rely on representations in textbooks to develop their understanding of photomicrographs. Purpose: This study investigated how students with low, medium and…

In this photo elicitation assignment, each student must take, select, and interpret a picture about a social issue that he/she has learned about in class. The student must then craft either a sensory poem, or answer the SHOWeD questions as designed by Shaffer and modified by Wang, which facilitates the student's interpretation of the picture. As a…

This study provides an analysis of selected aspects of the intended curriculum related to redox reactions as represented in secondary chemistry textbooks from the People's Republic of China, with a special view also on Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taiwan, and the Chinese minority in Malaysia. This study reveals how chemistry textbooks deal with visual…

Context: Discovering visual languages across professions is a complex task since it entails discovering a communication system composed of information in image or textual form called representations and also including various kinds of annotations such as notes. Such a task has been previously scarcely considered within research, and basically only…

Scientific results are communicated visually in the literature through diagrams, visualizations, and photographs. In this thesis, we developed a figure processing pipeline to classify more than 8 million figures from PubMed Central into different figure types and study the resulting patterns of visual information as they relate to scholarly…

The scale of features shown on outcrop photographs can be critical to geoscience interpretations, yet little is known about how well individuals estimate scale in images. This study utilizes a visualization test in which participants were asked to estimate the absolute size of several boxes shown in outcrop images using high resolution, stitched…

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…

Actions do not have inherent meaning but rather can be interpreted in many ways. The interpretation a person adopts has important effects on a range of higher order cognitive processes. One dimension on which interpretations can vary is the extent to which actions are identified abstractly--in relation to broader goals, personal characteristics,…

Visual representations are ubiquitous in modern-day science textbooks and have in recent years become an object of criticism and scrutiny. This article examines the extent to which changes in representations in textbooks published in the USA over the past six decades have invited those critiques. Drawing from a correlational analysis of a corpus…

Music has always been an important aspect of teenage life, but with the portability of the newest technological devices, it is harder and harder to separate students from their musical influences. In this article, the author describes a lesson wherein she incorporated their love of song into an engaging art project. In this lesson, she had…

The camera perspective from which a criminal confession is videotaped influences later assessments of its voluntariness and the suspect's guilt. Previous research has suggested that this camera perspective bias is rooted in perceptual rather than conceptual processes, but these data are strictly correlational. In 3 experiments, the authors…