The so-called millennial learners who currently populate college classrooms are purportedly digital natives whose repeated exposure to a host of new technologies has allegedly resulted in enhanced skills in several areas, including those related to technology and visual communication. By extension, the argument has been made that digital natives…

Despite the fact that to date Visual Literacy (VL) scholars have not arrived at a general consensus for a theoretical organization of the VL field, important conceptual investigations have emerged over the past four decades. In this paper we discuss and synthesize those studies. We then present a first attempt toward a cohesive theory of VL. The…

Discussion of visual literacy, visual cognition, visual thinking and learning, and visual knowledge focuses on women and gender differences. Topics addressed include educational equality and the visual, including equality versus difference; women and mass culture; difference and the design of visual instruction; and feminist education and the…

From a cognitive point of view, students construct new knowledge frameworks by relating new information to prior knowledge. Visual constructions help students reestablish unity of knowledge from "bits" of information received in linear note taking. Discusses the benefits of note taking and review, and summarizes visual note-taking methods and the…

Discusses several philosophies of linguistics and semiotics that debate the importance of words and their relationship to signs, language as the primary modeling system, and the historical primacy of verbal versus visual communication. Describes human communication as both language-based and nonverbal, both aspects inviting arbitrary and abstract…