Students at the middle school level can get stuck in their
reading comprehension at a 4th or 5th grade level. They often
learn to decode the words, but the overall picture of the story
eludes them. They show difficulty with delving into the deeper,
richer meaning of books and text, as well as developing
essential critical thinking skills for problem solving.
Visualizing and Verbalizing (V/V) is a learning program that
helps students improve reading comprehension, language
comprehension, and higher order thinking skills by developing
the ability to create mental imagery for the language they read
and hear, and to create an imaged gestalt (imagery for the big
picture, or whole). This mental imagery for language is called
concept imagery, and it is essential to comprehension skills.
Individuals with weak concept imagery may have difficulty
comprehending what they read, even if their reading skills are
otherwise unimpaired. These individuals may have trouble
following directions, or expressing their own ideas in