Recent developments in the definitional literature on mental retardation emphasize the need to ground the concept of adaptive behavior in an expanded model of intelligence, which includes practical and social intelligence. Development of a direct measure of practical intelligence might increase the likelihood that an assessment of this domain…

When parents bring their child or adolescent for consultation with a mental health professional, they are usually frustrated, worried, and confused. They may have a litany of complaints about symptoms and problematic behaviors exhibited by their son or daughter, and the entire family is likely to feel bewildered, caught up in intense, conflicting…

This paper describes the contribution the analysis of visual design can make to a critical reading of educational texts. Drawing on recent work on visual design, the paper analyses the composition of a newspaper advertisement seeking responses to an educational report. It illustrates the way elements of composition work to present a particular…

Essley was a "different learner," and now he works in schools showing teachers how visual/verbal tools can help all students, including their "different learners," succeed. One valuable tool is storyboarding, a process by which students build a story through visual stages--drafts, conferences, revisions--before writing even begins. Essley shares…

Four experiments are reported exploring whether distractor pictures activate their phonological properties in the course of speech production. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with two pictures and were asked to name one while ignoring the other. Distractor pictures were phonologically related, semantically related or unrelated to the…

Institutions of higher education are increasingly becoming dependent on Web-based marketing to reach out to their target audiences. The current empirical study examines the types of impressions formed by prospective students based on exposure to different university Web site images. A between-subjects experiment was conducted using four identical…

In this article two studies on the use of diagrams in computer-supported collaborative learning are compared. Focus is on the way argumentative diagrams can be used during collaborative learning tasks, more specifically how diagrams support argumentative interaction between students when they discuss ill-defined topics. The main goal is to…

Humorist Louis Lippman describes how proper lecture etiquette requires a professor to twist repeatedly between screen and paying customers to read and explain his Powerpoint projections. Such Rotary Academic Whiplash invariably results in the gravest of musculo-pedagogical distress. (Contains 1 note.)

This paper extends work on the construction of instructional modules that use graphical and simulation techniques for teaching statistical concepts (Marasinghe, et al. 1996; Iversen and Marasinghe 2001). These modules consist of two components: a software part and a lesson part. A computer program written in LISP-STAT with a highly interactive…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of phonological neighborhood density on the speech reaction time (SRT) and errors of children who do and do not stutter during a picture-naming task. Participants were nine 3-5-year-old children who stutter (CWS) matched in age and gender to nine children who do not stutter (CWNS). Initial…

In this article, the authors present the results of a survey of students at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands concerning the students' opinions about how PowerPoint should be used in university lectures. The most important outcome of the survey is that a vast majority of the respondents prefer a modest layout. Most students dislike…

A survey of BizCom listserv subscribers suggests that visual rhetoric receives relatively little attention within business communication curricula. Results indicate that programs typically do not require a course in visual rhetoric, and on average, 20% or less of teaching in undergraduate courses is dedicated to visual communication. The findings…

Although students may aim for an oral presentation that is clearly organized, well supported, and effectively delivered, teachers recognize that the primary goal of a presentation is communication; that is, the message received should be as close as possible to the message sent. Tools of message transmission, such as PowerPoint, are just a means…

There are many ways for children to engage in learning and experiencing mathematics and posters are one of them. From the author's observation of many classrooms the most common mathematical poster to be seen was the faithful multiplication times-tables. The purpose of this article is to encourage the use of effective posters and other visual…

Two small studies, one an "eye-tracking" study and the other a "remote observation" study, have been conducted to investigate ways to identify two kinds of online learner interactions: users flicking through the web pages in "browsing" action, and users engaging with the content of a page in "learning"…