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When learners explore dynamic and interactive visualisations they are often not able to interact with them in a systematic and goaloriented way. Frequently, even supporting learners in processes of discovery learning does not lead to better learning outcomes. This can be due to missing pre-requisite knowledge such as the coherent mental integration of the pictorial and symbolic sources of information. In order to support learners in this process, we encouraged them to interactively and externally relate different static sources of information to each other before exploring dynamic and interactive visualisations. We evaluated the benefit of this instructional support in two experimental studies concerning the domains of statistics and mechanics. It revealed that the active integration of static representations before processing dynamic visualisations resulted in better performance and can provide a basis for a more systematic and goal-oriented experimentation behaviour during simulation-based discovery learning.

In a systematic review, 194 studies on learning from animation were analysed. The analysis covers the learning domains, the representational characteristics of the animations, the assessed perceptual and cognitive achievements, and the assessment formats. Research on learning from animation focuses on assessing conceptual at the neglect of kinematic mental models. This is in contrast to an important rationale for making use of animations: that it needs to be learned what animations can specifically display, namely, how change in space and time occurs. This might explain why meta-analyses which compared the effectiveness of animations and static pictures found merely small overall effect sizes in favour of animations. To confirm this hypothesis, one meta-analysis was re-analysed with a new moderator. It encodes whether the features of the displayed changes were relevant to learning. Learning from animations was significantly more successful than learning from static pictures, if the features of the displayed changes had to be learned.

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Texts and pictures are often combined in order to improve learning. Many students, however, have difficulty to appropriately process text-picture combinations. We have thus conceptualized a learning strategy which supports learning from illustrated texts. By inducing the processes of information selection, organization, integration, and transformation, the learning strategy should lead to a more elaborated learning. After conducting a pilot study, a main study with 133 sixth-grade students from two different middle schools was carried out in order to analyse the learning effectiveness of the strategy. One group of students learned without the strategy whereas the second group learned with the strategy. All students had to complete a pre-test as well as a post-test which followed the learning period. The learning outcomes of the two groups were then compared: both studies demonstrated that the students who employed the strategy attained significantly better learning results. The effect sizes are medium to large.