The articles we'll read for this week's discussion are linked from the Lesson 4 discussion board in Canvas.
Coxon, S.V., 2012, Innovative allies: Spatial and creative abilities, Gifted Child Today, 35, p. 277-284.
Mayer, R.E., and V.K. Sims, 1994, For Whom Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? Extensions of a Dual-Coding Theory of Multimedia Learning, Journal of Educational Psychology, 86, p. 389-401.
The first paper discusses the fact that contemporary school curricula do not specifically address spatial visualization skills but that innovative teachers could quite easily incorporate activities that speak to these skills while still meeting the various standards of learning. Teaching kids some computer programming is specifically mentioned. If anybody wants to, go to the program called "Scratch [1]" and play around.
The second paper is by educational psychologists who are trying to discover what kind of person benefits from what kind of educational presentation. The idea is that while technology has enabled us to produce whiz-bang animations and graphics, research into whether these techniques actually help people learn hasn't quite caught up yet. So they ran some experiments to try to figure this out.
As you read, consider the following questions, which we will discuss as a class:
Once you have finished the readings, engage in a class discussion that will take place over the entire week devoted to Lesson 4. This discussion will require you to participate multiple times over that period.
You will be graded on the quality of your participation. See the grading rubric [2] for specifics.