Richard Lowe

Department of Education
Curtin University of Technology
Perth, Australia

Animations increasingly feature in technology-based learning materials. However, the basis upon which much educational animation is designed and used by practitioners tends to be intuitive rather than principled. Consequently, the educational effectiveness of the animations included in these learning materials is uncertain. This presentation explores recent theoretical developments and empirical findings having implications for the design and use of educational animations. Its particular focus is the potential of animations to facilitate comprehension of complex, specialised dynamic subject matter. To date, most research on learning with animations has dealt with relatively simple and familiar subject matter. It has produced a number of principles that are applicable to more straightforward types of animations. However, those principles are not necessarily sufficient for animations that impose greater information processing demands on learners.

Dynamic depictions of complex subject matter are especially challenging for learners lacking background knowledge in the depicted domain. Both visuospatial and dynamic characteristics of an animated display can contribute to the complexity responsible for the challenges such learners face. In order to make this high-demand situation tractable, learners must be selective about which aspects of the display receive their attention. Lacking support for top-down processing of the animation, low domain knowledge learners tend to be more reliant on bottom-up approaches when extracting information from this type of display. As a result, their extraction may favour information that is perceptually salient but not necessarily highly relevant to the learning task. Under these circumstances, manipulation of the way information is presented has the potential to make its relevant aspects more accessible. For hundreds of years, approaches that reduce visuospatial realism have been used to make static graphics more educationally effective. With the ascendancy of animations in education, it is appropriate to investigate the use of parallel approaches with dynamic graphics that reduce behavioural realism.