From her first encounter with stereoscopic 3D technology designed for classroom instruction, Megan Timme, principal at Hamilton Park Pacesetter Magnet School in Dallas, sensed it could be transformative. Last spring, when she began pilot-testing 3D content in her third-, fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms, Timme wasn't disappointed. Students…

In several resources, especially in textbooks, there are two or more alternatives for terms. These terms generally come from foreign words and alternative equivalences of these words. The aim of the study is to investigate whether this situation causes students problems in perceiving the terms; in which alternatives, the conceptual perception is…

This research project used Functional Measurement to examine how the brand name of consumer products impacts intended purchasing decisions. Thirty undergraduate students tested actual products from three different product categories (crayons, tissues, and tortilla chips). Each product category consisted of three different brands; one with high…

Purpose: Evidence supports using visual scene displays (VSDs) with young children using speech-generating devices. This study examined initial and subsequent performance during VSD use by children age 24-27 and 33-36 months to explore child characteristics that may relate to navigational skill differences. Method: Children located 9 vocabulary…

Purpose: Although a growing body of literature has identified the positive effects of visual speech on speech and language learning, oral movements of infant-directed speech (IDS) have rarely been studied. This investigation used 3-dimensional motion capture technology to describe how mothers modify their lip movements when talking to their…

How do external visual representations (e.g., graph, diagram) promote or constrain students' ability to identify system components and their interrelations, to reinforce a systemic view through the application of the STS approach? University students (N = 150) received information cards describing cellphones' communication system and its subsystem…

This study explores how a group of nine year olds in Korea form historical inferences using pictures of historical paintings. It investigates whether they have the ability to form plausible inferences about the lives of people depicted in these pictures, what they can infer about the lives of people depicted in the pictures using prior knowledge,…

Verbal protocols have provided literacy researchers with a strong understanding of what processes readers (both adults and children) use as they read narrative and informational text. Little is known, however, about the comprehension processes that are prompted by the graphics in these texts. This study of nine second graders used verbal protocol…

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…

Many lecture halls today have two or more screens to be used by instructors for lectures with computer-supported visual aids. Typically, this additional screen real estate is not used to display additional information; rather a single stream of information is projected on all screens. We describe a controlled laboratory study that empirically…

Three picture-word interference experiments addressed the question of whether the scope of grammatical advance planning in sentence production corresponds to some fixed unit or rather is flexible. Subjects produced sentences of different formats under varying amounts of cognitive load. When speakers described 2-object displays with simple…

This was a simple classroom research project and its purpose was to examine how high up in the scale of Bloom's taxonomy students were able to reach to understand higher order thinking skills when studying critical thinking questions. Two classes of senior high school students who had been studying in the same bilingual program for five years were…

There is an assumption that pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is observable and measurable. Yet, in many studies referencing PCK, the construct of PCK remains both undefined operationally and poorly described. In physical education, although one study has measured teachers' PCK using teachers' weak and strong units of instruction (Ayvazo, 2007),…

Educational practices are needed to promote strong vocabulary growth so that vocabulary can be both the cause and result of successful reading. Vocabulary interventions need to begin early and continue for a sustained period of time (Beck & McKeown, 2007a; Biemiller, 2003; Foorman, Seals, Anthony & Pollard-Durodola, 2003). According to theoretical…

This book is about the classroom, the most important meeting place for teachers and pupils in an education building. Individuals' knowledge, however, about what happens inside this space is limited. In many respects the classroom is still the black box of the educational system. To open up this box, this volume brings together scholars from the…