The Visual World of the Child

Connecting the dots: Children's use of a systematic figure to facilitate mapping and search.

“…Five-year-olds may have found it difficult to figure out on their own how the locations could form a dog. This conclusion would be consistent with the results of previous work (e.g., Vurpillot, 1976) that suggested that 5-year-olds may be less likely than older children to interpret locations in terms of wellknown patterns. However, further studies would be required before one could conclude that 5-year-olds could not benefit from hearing the label.…”

“…Future studies could investigate when, and how, children can (a) benefit from labels and (b) look for and find structure without either a visual example or a label. Part of this development may involve acquiring knowledge of an increasingly large number of figures, but it may also involve learning to search actively for ways of organizing spatial information (see Axia & Caravaggi, 1987;Mandler & Parker, 1976;Stiles et al, 1990;Vurpillot, 1976). In this regard, it is interesting to note that the performance of 2 five-year-olds in the no-lines group in Study I was as good as the average level of performance in the lines group and that 1 of them spontaneously said that the structure formed a dog pattern.…”

Effects of word length and word frequency among dyslexic, ADHD-I and typical readers

“…This striking feature was discovered by Pavlidis (1981b) in a group of children with dyslexia characterized by their inability to sustain fixation for more than a second on a task that involved following precisely and as fast as possible five light-emitting diodes (LEDs). It is important to note that the inability to accurately maintain fixation at a given point for one second or more has also been observed in other dyslexic studies (Lloyd & Pavlidis, 1978;Vurpillot, 1976).…”

Evaluating the Efficacy of a Learning Trajectory for Early Shape Composition

“…The developmental progression for shape composition was developed and validated over multiple studies (Clements, Wilson et al, 2004; Clements & Sarama, 2007/2013). Born in observations of kindergartners composing physical and computer shapes (Sarama, Clements, & Vukelic, 1996), we combined these observations with related observations from other researchers (Mansfield & Scott, 1990; Sales, 1994) and some elements of psychological research (e.g., Vurpillot, 1976) to create the initial developmental progression. We then engaged in cycles of observations and analysis to refine the developmental progression (and begin to develop instructional activities; Clements & Sarama, 2007/2013) including collaborative action research with eight teachers.…”