Papers 3 - When animation benefits from User Control

A. learner control being effective:

Mayer & Chandler, 2001; When Learning Is Just a Click Away: Does Simple User Interaction Foster Deeper Understanding of Multimedia Messages?
- students were presented twice with animation explaining how the storm begins. Some students could control the speed of animation the first time around while the others were controlling the second time around. Having control at the beginning facilitating better learning.
- This supports cognitive load thory: when there is more spare mental load (low extraneous load when animation is not rushed) there is more resources for learning and creating schemas (germane load)
-introducing interactivity and as such did not improve learning.

Hasler et al., 2007; Learner Control, Cognitive Load and Instructional Animation
-'The animations were either system-paced using a continuous animation, learner-paced using discrete segments or learner paced using ‘stop’ and ‘play’ buttons. The two learner-paced groups showed higher test performance with relatively lower cognitive load compared to the two system-paced groups, despite the fact that the ‘stop’ and ‘play’ buttons were rarely used'
-results were obtained only for tasks of higher difficulty
-'Environmental organising and linking principle: Working memory is only limited when dealing with novel information. When dealing with previously organised information from long-term memory, there are no known limits to working memory. Large amounts of information can be brought into working memory from long-term memory and used to determine activity in the environment (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995).'
-'cognitive load effects disappear when dealing with low element interactivity material (Sweller, 2003, 2004). However, the level of element interactivity is relative to the level of learners’ expertise (Kalyuga, Ayres, Chandler, & Sweller, 2003). For experienced learners, a whole set of interacting elements may be incorporated into a schema and treated as a single element in working memory'
- clt research describes few principles governing cognitive loads: split attention effects , redundancy effect, modality effect, pacing and segmentation
-'learners should be presented information rather than asked to explore a problem space. Accordingly, in the current experiment, learners were presented information on the causes of day and night rather than being asked to search for and explore possible causes.'
-in the second study one group has seen the continues animation twice while the other one has seen a controlled animation twice. Higher learning occured in the controlled condition
-''Learners may closely monitor the information in order to decide whether they need to think about it further by pausing the animation. [...] In contrast, the continuous animation group may have treated the animation as little more than a movie and given it very little thought. '

Schwan & Riempp, 2004:The cognitive benefits of interactive videos: learning to tie nautical knots
- users were presented with either interactive or not interactive movie of how to tie for different sailing knots. Students in the interactive condition took much less time (up to twice shorter) to learn the knots and interaction was much more frequently used when learning the more difficult knots.
-Students in interactive condition did not have more time. 'the effect of requiring more time to watch the more difficult parts of the video repeatedly, in slow motion, or with stops was more or less compensated by skipping the more easy parts of the videos or watching them in speeded mode. But although the viewing times were roughly the same, the viewers of the interactive videos developed a better understanding of the depicted processes than the viewers of the non-interactive videos'
-interactive application was keeping a log of all users interactions: number of stops to practice, number of stops without practising, slow motions, time lapses, number of the direction changes, variability of viewing time across the media.


B. learner control Mixed results

Kriz & Hegarty, 2007:Top-down and bottom-up influences on learning from animations
-in four studies participants were presented with diagrams or animations explaining a mechanical device (European toilet flush) with varying interactive controls and signalling devices. It was found that enhancing animation does not facilitate learning
- this is a very passionately written paper with interesting design (too little details to tell exactly how it workes). Very difficult task selected serves the purpose of escalating the cognitive load needed to analyse an animation way above the threshold. Also the animations might have been just the diagram with annotations (not obvious), so they could not use all the possibilities of animation medium.


Moreno & Valdez, 2005:Cognitive Load and Learning Effects of Having Students Organize Pictures and Words in Multimedia Environments: The Role of Student Interactivity and Feedback
- authors are trying to confirm the theory that 'learning improves when students make, rather than take, meaning'. Participants are learning about the Genesis of storm and either have to learn from cards arranged in a correct order or first ordered them and then learn. Because of a bad application design (intermediate correct/wrong feedback ), users employed trial and error method to organising the cards, and simply had less time learning. In the second study the error was corrected and additionally students were asked to explain why do they think that this is the correct order before they got any feedback on their ordering. He was found at being asked to explain facilitated learning.
- This paper is an interesting history of failure, and proves that reflecting on learning facilitates learning


C learner control frameworks and other:

Moreno & Mayer, 2007; Interactive Multimodal Learning Environments
-the authors describe five design principles: guided activity, reflection, feedback, control, and pretraining.
- Students learn better when allowed to interact with pedagogical agent who helps guide their cognitive processing, when asked to reflect upon correct answers, when getting explanatory rather than corrective feedback, when allowed to control the pace presentation, when they receive focused training


Lowe (2006) - Educational animation: Who should call the shots?
- Author argues that currently designed animations are overwhelming users and the more prescriptive and analytical methods needs to be devised.
- Giving user control might be bad because it introduces an additional task and beginner users might neglect some important details or inappropriately allocate the attention.
- Ideal presentation should emphasise, repeat and slowdown relevant sections without overwhelming users with too much control.

Love 2005 :Changing Perceptions of Animated Diagrams
-very simple and graceful study. Participants are presented with the recording of Newton's cradle, either in normal speed for a half speed. The eye movement patterns and voice descriptions are recorded and analysed.
- From vocabulary analysis it was found that slow motion condition participants were more analytical and explained more, they also looked at the system as a set of items rather than one item. The same effect was found in the eye tracker data.


Domagk, Schwartz & Plass (2010):Interactivity in multimedia learning: An integrated model
- interactivity is not a very well-defined concept and elements that need to be taken under consideration are: behavioural activity, learning environment, cognitive activity, a emotion/motivation, mental model.