Timeless Images: Past and Present.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which teachers and students can leverage the power and potential of visuals to encode information and experiences as personalized meanings, and to help people create their own timeless images as ways to understand the world. The foundation is laid for conducting research to test the assertion that visual constructions can be used to help learners construct highly personalized meanings to information. The cognitive potentials of visual constructions are summarized and examples are offered that might be useful to students and teachers. Four visual construction types are defined: page organization, visualization methods, concept diagrams, and notetaking teaching processes. Teacher and student strategies are suggested, for appropriate grade ranges (K-5, middle school, and high school), to implement these visual constructions. Three broad research goals to consider in order to establish some basis for the cognitive potentials of visual construction are: (1) How do personalized meanings via visual constructions create understanding? (2) What are the effects of possible cognitive-motivational variable links when visual constructions are used by teachers and students? and (3) Which teacher and students strategies using visual constructions contribute to the development of self-directed learning characteristics? Four tables and two figures illustrate study concepts. (Contains 23 references.) (MAS)