Making instructional animations more effective: a cognitive load approach

Abstract

This themed issue consists of seven empirical papers, as well as an introduction and discussion, and has its genesis in three symposia, organised by the authors of this article and presented at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in San Francisco, California. The papers investigate a number of conditions under which instructional animations may be effective. This article uses cognitive load theory (CLT) to provide an explanation for why animated instructions have not currently produced the learning benefits expected. A brief overview of the papers with a focus on how they accommodate critical aspects of cognitive load is given. The issue finishes with a discussion on each paper and identifies some common principles and recommendations for instructional design and research into animations.

Example-Based Learning: Integrating Cognitive and Social-Cognitive Research Perspectives

“…In case of the latter, the transience of the information requires learners to maintain each presented step in working memory while attending to the step that is currently being executed and processing them in relation to each other. This is extremely cognitively demanding, especially for novice students, and might hamper learning (e.g., Ayres and Paas 2007). Segmenting such transient examples might help novices' learning because it gives them the necessary time to process information and/or makes them more aware of the structure of the problem-solving procedure (see Spanjers, Van Gog and Van Merriënboer in press).…”

Towards a Framework for Attention Cueing in Instructional Animations: Guidelines for Research and Design

“…Several studies have shown that learning from animations is hindered if presentation speed is too high (e.g., Meyer et al 2009), or if attention is distracted by irrelevant movements in the animation (e.g., Lowe 1999). Accordingly, several researchers have argued that animations place excessive demands on the learners' cognitive system due to the transitory nature of the presented information and the simultaneous depiction of multiple changes (Ayres and Paas 2007a;Lowe 1999Lowe , 2003Tversky et al 2002).…”

“…Therefore, the transient nature of animations may cause learners to split their visual attention over different elements that are dispersed over time. This may consequently challenge the resource limitations of the learner's WM (Miller 1956) and hinder learning (Ayres and Paas 2007a;Paas et al 2003).…”

The Mirror Neuron System and Observational Learning: Implications for the Effectiveness of Dynamic Visualizations

“…However, it has also been argued that the transient nature of dynamic visualizations challenges the assumption that the mental inferences of movement or change required by static visualizations are more effort demanding than perceiving this change as dynamic visualizations (see e.g., Ayres & Paas, 2007b). The limitations of working memory, both regarding capacity and time (Barrouillet & Camos, 2007;Cowan, 2001;Miller, 1956), pose an immediate problem when dealing with transient information.…”