In this article, the author describes an underwater scene composition for elementary-education majors. This project deals with watercolor with crayon or oil-pastel resist (medium); the beauty of nature represented by fish in the underwater scene (theme); texture and pattern (design elements); drawing simple forms (drawing skill); and composition…

This article describes a lesson in picture depth. The lesson involves tracing paper layers, object size and raising the horizon line per page layer. Students learn to look at and scan a photograph or print, break down the picture's qualities, and design elements and principles. Students also gain an increased appreciation for design and artist…

Research (Fish, 2004) suggests that everybody should be taught how to freehand sketch and utilise it as a tool for supporting the visualising instinct. A fundamental shift in philosophy of the technology education system in Ireland towards design driven subjects brought with it a need to develop practising teacher's technological capabilities.…

The ethics of engaging in sociological research involving children has primarily been shaped by a set of general principles and codes that are applied to all situations. Whilst this has been a crucial guideline for researching children's experiences, it is inadequate in addressing the moral complexities that confront researchers in specific…

This article discusses the process of a study designed to develop university students' sketching skills in schools of architecture. Acknowledging the relationship between cognition and writing, it aims to investigate the role of writing in learning sketching among architecture students and to examine how students regulate their thoughts by writing…

Students, their parents, and even perfect strangers want to know: How do you take something from your imagination and turn it into a satisfying drawing, painting, or sculpture? It may sound simple to a seasoned artist, but many students need to be walked through the process. In this article, the author describes an assignment which was inspired by…

Introduction: While there is a general agreement on the theoretical importance of epistemological beliefs, the research area is struggling with the measurement of these beliefs. In this contribution, the use of drawings to ascertain epistemological beliefs is explored. Method: Three studies are described. In Study 1, we asked participants to draw…

In this article, the author describes how her eleventh- and twelfth-grade portfolio class used art as a social concern through a sketchbook and a linoleum print. Students thumbed through copies of the "New York Times" to find an article that described a modern-day social concern. Students were assigned to choose an article, summarize it, and come…

The world's population is growing by about 80 million people a year, implying an estimated increased freshwater demand of about 64 billion cubic meters annually (World Water Assessment Programme, 2009, Water in a Changing World: United Nations World Water Development Report 3, Chap. 1, p. 3-21). Groundwater depletion, which reduces the amount of…

The Draw an Engineer Test (DAET) is a common measure of students' perceptions of engineers. The coding systems currently used for K-12 research are general rubrics or checklists to capture the images presented in the drawing, which leave out some of the richness of students' perceptions, currently only captured with an accompanying student…

How is the natural environment in the neighborhood representative of the larger biosphere in which people live? Studying the local birds and flora of the Pacific Northwest in the context of the local parks and ponds provided a rich opportunity for third-grade students at St. Thomas School in Medina, Washington, to explore and learn about…

The objective of this exploratory study is to characterize by means of drawings if the developmental patterns in the graphic representation of organ and organ systems progresses related to age of participants. Secondly, whether there is an integration of sex organs into the internal body image. The drawings representing the inside of the body in…

This article describes a collaborative action research project that followed two teachers and their students in a primary school in the Paro valley of Bhutan as they began to implement the Project Approach and promote children's use of visual representation. The article begins with a description of the primary education system and teacher…

Many studies in the chemical education literature report students' alternative conceptions in chemistry and the difficulty they present for future learning. In this paper, we review existing diagnostic tools used to uncover students' alternative conceptions in chemistry and suggest that there are two fundamental issues with such instruments,…

Environmental education researchers have called for a greater analysis of "learning" in environmental education in relation to contemporary theories and explanatory frameworks of learning. Situated learning, as a prominent example, is a sociocultural theory that contends that learning is a social process that occurs as individuals…