The study examined whether the modality effect is caused by either high visuo-spatial load or a lack of temporal contiguity when processing written text and pictures. Students (N = 147) viewed pictures on the development of tornados, which were accompanied by either spoken or written explanations presented simultaneously with, before, or after the…

Jane Card has long been fascinated by the power of visual sources to stimulate pupil thought and discussion. In previous articles she has shared insights from her own expert practice, fusing deep subject knowledge with careful planning to generate highly skilful questioning. Here she presents another rich example of classroom practice, carefully…

The author was surfing the Internet and stumbled upon some amazing and surprisingly beautiful microscopic structures of living organisms. The colors and shapes of these individual forms of life were beautiful, textured, and intricate. In this article, the author describes how her eighth-grade students made tiles inspired by these microscopic…

With the rapid advancement of technology in the photographic industry, more photographers than ever (willingly or in response to this shift) are replacing their darkroom-based facilities with digital ones. This technological shift has changed the focus of the artmaking process in that photographers now spend more time editing their photographs…

Visualizing how the parts of a document relate to each other and producing automatically generated quality measures that people can understand are means that writers can use to improve the quality of their compositions. This paper presents a novel document visualization technique and a measure of quality based on the average semantic distance…

At first sight the speech mark would seem to be one of the easiest to use of all punctuation marks. After all, all one has to do is take the piece of speech or written language and surround it with the appropriately shaped marks. But, are speech marks as easy to understand and use as suggested above, especially for young children beginning their…

Jean Piaget's theory is a central reference point in the study of logico-mathematical development in children. One of the most famous Piagetian tasks is number conservation. Failures and successes in this task reveal two fundamental stages in children's thinking and judgment, shifting at approximately 7 years of age from visuospatial intuition to…

A person can tell quite a lot about what goes on in a classroom or a school even if he visits after everyone has gone home. Just by looking at the walls--or, more precisely, what is on the walls--it is possible to get a feel for the educational priorities, the attitudes about children, even the assumptions about human nature of the people in…

Momentum space and Minkowski diagrams are powerful tools for interpreting and analysing relativistic collisions in one or two spatial dimensions. All relevant quantities that characterize a collision, including the mass, velocity, momentum and energy of the interacting particles, both before and after collision, can be directly seen from a single…

In this article, the author addresses a problem that plagues virtually all academics, as well as most people in business, K-12 education, and many other walks of life. At one time or another most members of post-millennial western society have suffered through that most hideous of well-intentioned experiences, the botched PowerPoint presentation.…

Student understanding of biological representations has not been well studied. Yet, we know that to be efficient problem solvers in evolutionary biology and systematics, college students must develop expertise in thinking with a particular type of representation, phylogenetic trees. The purpose of this study was to understand how undergraduates…

Artworks are not produced in a vacuum, but by the interaction of experiences, and interrelationships of ideas, perceptions and feelings acknowledged and expressed in some form. Students, like mature artists, may be inspired and motivated by their memories and observations of their surroundings. Like adult artists, students may find that their own…

The texts that adolescents encounter today are often multimodal, meaning they incorporate a variety of modes, including visual images, hypertext, and graphic design elements along with written text. Expanding the perspectives readers use to make sense of the multimodal texts is an important aspect of comprehension instruction. Moving beyond the…

This paper encourages environmental and humane education scholars to consider the ethical implications of how nonhuman animals are represented in research. I argue that research representations of animals can work to either break down processes of "othering," or reinforce them. I explore various options for representing other animals, including…

Having an interactive whiteboard (IWB), how does a teacher integrate it into his/her lessons? This article shares one school's story of how to integrate IWBs into the curriculum. Ten ideas teachers can try in integrating IWB into their lessons are also offered.