The "ISSS Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. The following papers are included in the 2013 proceedings: (1) Teaching About Asia in a Social Science Education Program (Cyndi Mottola Poole and Joshua L. Kenna); (2) Teaching Students about…

This paper introduces the subject of communication apprehension and presents five group-based exercises for the basic public speaking course. The paper notes that communication apprehension can affect people's personal and occupational lives, and that visualization, skills training, and systematic desensitization are methods that can help control…

Science and mathematics educators are expected to use existing educational technologies effectively and to keep informed about emerging technologies that might become important educational tools in the not-so-distant future. This monograph offers some help in that regard by highlighting a number of existing and emerging educational technologies.…

The brain works by making patterns, and this process can be visualized through a medium called visual tools. The book discusses three types of visual tools: brainstorming webs, task-specific organizers, and thinking-process maps. Sample lessons, assessments, and descriptions of visual tools in action are included. Emphasis is placed on the…

Few would argue that students struggle with understanding and representing functions. There are many theories on why the abstraction of mathematical processes poses such cognitive difficulty, but so far functional programming is most often taught in a manner that discourages the use of visual intuition. The paper, by contrast, describes a…

The paper argues that a relationship between visualization and mathematical problem solving ability exists. Research suggests that visual imagery leads to increased understanding of mathematical concepts at both the primary and secondary levels. Mathematical potential is not necessarily "born." Potential can be created in the least likely students…

Using the metaphoric story device of two tribes, one that builds their culture around words and the other which depends primarily on visual perception, this paper suggests a distinctive mental paradigm at work within the society of artists, who pursue visual literacy through graphic ideation. The author discusses his education in art and his…

Function Probe is a multi-representational software for Apple Macintosh computers. It was designed to allow students to approach problems in different ways and/or use different representations. This case study describes a 16-year-old student as he creates a path among a variety of representations of transformations of functions while using the…

To explore and characterize the problem-solving processes of experts evaluating and revising text/illustration combinations, a study was conducted with experts from three different fields. Participants, who included five subject matter experts (SMEs) in biology, five professional designers, and five editors, were asked to diagnose and address…

A few of the relationships between visual and verbal components are explored. Visuals are considered to be things that can be seen, visible things other than printed words that are used in a communication process. The term verbal applies to written or spoken words. The natural tendency for visual and verbal components to be mutually supportive has…

The relationship between instruction and instructional design is explored. The aim of instruction is to assist the individual as learner. The Learner, the Content, the Media, the Teacher Function, and the Context within which learning is to occur interact during a period of time to form an instructional episode (the CMT paradigm). Considering all…

Numerous studies indicate that communication apprehension can and does have considerable negative consequences for college students so affected. There are strategies that can be undertaken in the classroom that may help alleviate communication apprehension for some students. Classroom instructors must first recognize how students are processing…

A discrepancy exists between children's ability to compute and their ability to solve mathematical word problems. The literature suggests a variety of methods that have been attempted to improve this skill with varying success. The utilization of manipulatives, visualization, illustration, and emphasis on improving listening skills all were…

A systematic research program will study the cumulative effects of selected instructional variables on learning a spatial visualization task. The goal of the research is to identify instructional variables that will improve the performance of female students on the Aircraft Instrument Comprehension (AIC) test. The AIC program is intended to teach…

A study examined how children visualize, draw, and make inferences about story content presented either aurally on tape or as an animated film. Audio versions of the story were manipulated to include short descriptions, in either literal or nonliteral language, directly analogous to the film's visual depiction at four points in the story. These…