State College, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- A Pennsylvania mother has decided she does not want her two children to take the two-week-long standardized tests given by her state as part of the federal No Child Left Behind law. And she hopes other parents will do the same.

Michele Gray's sons -- Ted Rosenblum, 11, and John Michael Rosenblum, 9 -- did independent study the week of March 14 while their classmates were filling in hundreds of bubbles in classrooms with doors marked, "Quiet.…

Visual perception is a function of our eyes and brain. We see images as a whole rather then in parts. However, images can be broken down into their visual elements: line, shape, texture, and color. These elements are to images as grammar is to language. Together they allow our eyes to see images and our brain to recognize them. In this section, we will talk about each of these elements except color, because color perception is a big subject and…

When disaster strikes in America, heroes rush in. We’ve seen it time and again: when all seems lost, real-life supermen (and women) step up to save the day. But what if, right now, there is a hidden catastrophe spreading quietly, insidiously through our nation’s cities, towns and communities — and yet we have the power to stop it? What if our children and their futures were in peril? Who will become a hero now? 

From Davis Guggenheim, the Academy Award®-winning director of AN…

Read Let's Get Visual, by Brian S. Friedlander, Ph.D., an article on software for creating visual tools for children with autism and other developmental disorders.

Individuals with autism are often described as "visual learners" or "visual thinkers." In fact, Temple Grandin, a well-known speaker on, and an individual with, autism titled one of her better known books, Thinking in Pictures. My personal experience, while limited, has certainly shown this…

(CNN) -- For an injury that is largely invisible, it is no small irony that a new test to detect concussion involves the eyes.

The two-minute test, which tracked subtle vision problems in athletes with suspected traumatic brain injury, was a near-perfect gauge of whether a concussion had occurred, according to a new study.

"Fifty percent of the brain's pathways are devoted to vision," said Dr. Laura Balcer, study co-author, who added that eye movement provides a window…

Dynamic Learning throughout the School Year: Fitting It In and Finding the Value

You might ask how an educator can fit video making into their curriculum. My method was to use the short Thanksgiving week and the last week of school before the Winter break, as both of these weeks are filled with miscellaneous projects. I have also used parents as helpers, by taking filming into a quiet hall. This allows me to move on with what I had planned for the day, without…

In a first-ever demonstration, UCLA School of Medicine and Caltech researchers have shed new light on how the "mind's eye" works, uncovering evidence that single neurons -- individual cells in the brain -- are involved in recalling specific visual images to mind.…

My class had just finished covering three chalkboards with a rather dazzling array of concept clusters, illustrations, and links among disparate ideas. Clearly, a lot of learning had been generated. As I picked up the eraser to clear the board, I mentioned it was too bad that Chelsea and Eric (who were absent) had missed this vibrant discussion.

“Well if you promise not to bust me, Dr. E, I could take a picture of all this and send it to them,” offered Claire. She pointed at the…

Visual memory

Visual memory is part of memory preserving some characteristics of our senses pertaining to visual experience. We are able to place in memory information that resembles objects, places, animals or people in sort of a mental image. Some authors refer to this experience as an "our mind's eye" through which we can retrieve from our memory a mental image of the original object, place, animal or person. The first person to give…

Visual perception is one of the senses of the body which allows the brain to intercept and interpret visible light, creating the ability to see. Sight is regarded as a critical sense by many people, as the world contains a great deal of important visual information. Many organisms have developed some form of visual perception, and there are a number of different…

My youngest son wasn’t that old before I recognized that he gathered knowledge very differently than my older son. For one thing, he was glued to the television whenever it was on. It didn’t even seem to matter what show was playing, he would be watching. I will never forget walking into the living room one day when he was about six months old and seeing him staring up from his walker transfixed by a report Mike Wallace was doing on 60 Minutes. That was the minute I knew my little guy had a…

We often see parents shaking their heads - how is it that it's both auditory and visual processing? But it's not some odd luck, the visual and auditory systems are tightly coupled, and each makes up for the other when some problem arises.

We shouldn't think of the brain having "deficits" - because reorganization is the rule rather than the exception, and generally loss in one domain, leads to compensatory changes in the other. Auditory processing problems are accompanied by…

Douglas Hofstadter has an interesting discussion in a Presidential lecture at Stanford. Skip the introductions and start at 13 minutes 30 seconds to listen to Hofstadter.

Hofstadter believes that analogy making is at the core of all cognition, and what is especially interesting is how frequently analogies seem to…