The Influence of Learner Control in Instructional Animation

Béatrice S. Hasler, Bernd Kersten, & John Sweller

Instructional animation has become increasingly popular in computer-based education over the last decade. However, research comparing animation and static visuals has provided inconsistent results, and failed to support the assumption of a general superiority of animated over static visuals (for a review see Bétrancourt & Tversky, 2000). It appears that under some circumstances, animation can hinder rather than improve learning. Animation may impose greater cognitive processing demands than static visuals because animated information is frequently transient. The question arises whether learners generally experience a high cognitive load when studying instructional animation, or whether that load can be ameliorated by an appropriate instructional design. This instructional issue is related to learners’ working memory limitations and is addressed by cognitive load research. Cognitive load theory (Sweller, 1994; 2005) highlights the importance of controlling working memory demands in order to facilitate learning. It provides a theoretical framework for studying how students process and learn from instructional animation, from which appropriate design principles for computer animation can be derived. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to investigate how animation needs to be designed in order to optimize its instructional efficiency.

Three versions of an animation with simultaneous narration and a narration-only version were used to teach primary school students the determinants of day and night. 72 male primary school students of a boy’s college located in Sydney, Australia, who had not yet been taught the subject matter, were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental groups. The three animations were either (1) system-paced with continuous animation, (2) learner-paced using discrete segments or (3) learner-paced due to the availability of a stop-play button on a continuous version of the animation.

The animation requires the macromedia flash plugin. If you cannot view the animation, please download the plugin!

When the animation ends, press "i" to display the instructions to the knowledge test, and "r" to display the results.

Results

The instructional efficiency of the four instructional versions was calculated using Paas and van Merriënboer’s (1993) technique. Efficiency scores were calculated as a joint function of the reported level of cognitive load using subjective difficulty rating, and performance measures.

The two learner-paced animation groups showed higher learning performance with relatively lower cognitive load compared to both the continuous animation and the narration-only groups. Importantly, the stop-play group outperformed the continuous group despite the fact that the stop-play button was used very rarely by the students. This result suggests that the mere presence of the stop-play button along with instructions in its use increased germane cognitive load, thus leading to enhanced learning performance. Students who were presented the continuous version of the animation performed no better than the narration-only group, which indicates that animation without user control was no better than no animation. The better performance of the learner-paced versions of the animation compared to system-paced instruction provides empirical support for the assumption of user control in animation being beneficial for learning and understanding.

--> Replication Study

References

Bétrancourt, M., & Tversky, B. (2000). Effect of computer animation on users’ performance: A review. Le travail Humain, 63, 311-330.

Hasler, B. S., Kersten, B., & Sweller, J. (2006, April). User control as an instructional method to reduce learners' cognitive load in transient animation. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA 2006), San Francisco, April 6-11, 2006. [online]

Paas, F. G. W. C., & van Merriënboer, J. J. G. (1993). The efficiency of instructional conditions: An approach to combine mental-effort and performance measures. Human Factors, 35, 737-743.

Sweller, J. (1994). Cognitive load theory, learning difficulty and instructional design. Learning and Instruction, 4, 295-312.

Sweller, J. (2005). Implications of cognitive load theory for multimedia learning. In R. E. Mayer (Ed.): Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning. (pp. 19-30). New York: Cambridge University Press.