{"id":7322,"date":"2023-11-06T08:00:33","date_gmt":"2023-11-06T13:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/braindevs.net\/blog\/blog\/?p=7322"},"modified":"2023-11-08T14:50:10","modified_gmt":"2023-11-08T19:50:10","slug":"do-animations-improve-learning-a-definitivie-answer-please","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/do-animations-improve-learning-a-definitivie-answer-please\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Animations Improve Learning? A Definitivie Answer, Please…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently I discussed working memory overload\u00a0<\/em>with a group of wise and thoughtful teachers.<\/p>\n

I showed them one of my favorite GIFs:<\/p>\n

a glass (representing working memory),<\/p>\n

slowly filling up with stuff (teaching methods, complex information),<\/p>\n

so that there is ultimately no room left in the glass (that is: no room left for understanding<\/em>).<\/p>\n

VOILA: working memory overload in one handy animation.<\/p>\n

I love this GIF, and show it often.<\/p>\n

\"Young<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet when I gave these teachers time to discuss this animation, they honestly didn’t like it very much. They had lots of specific (and insightful) suggestions, but the overall message was: thumbs down.<\/p>\n

So: should I ditch the GIF?<\/p>\n

Where to Start<\/h2>\n

For a guy who writes a blog about research-informed teaching, the next step seem obvious: find out what the research says!<\/p>\n

Surely I can find an answer — maybe even a definitive one.<\/p>\n

Alas, I quickly stumbled into a quandry.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, we’ve got lots of good research suggesting that — on the whole — students do NOT learn more from animated information.<\/p>\n

One of the best known studies<\/a> — led by the\u00a0much-esteemed Richard Meyer — supports the static media hypothesis<\/em>: “static illustrations with printed text reduce extraneous processing and promote germane processing as compared\u00a0with narrated animations.”<\/p>\n

In this study,\u00a0researchers used animations about everything from lightning formation to toilet tanks to see if they helped students understand.<\/p>\n

These animations never helped, and often hurt, student learning.<\/p>\n

One the other hand, a substantial meta-analysis<\/a> of 40 studies finds a “beneficial effect of the presence of animated display for learning dynamic phenomena.”<\/p>\n

So: what to do when we’ve got persuasive — and contradictory — evidence?<\/p>\n

A Feature, Not a Bug<\/h2>\n

For people unfamiliar with research-world, this kind of contradiction might seem like a failure. If the people who do the research can’t agree on an answer<\/em>, surely we should just ignore them.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0would offer a different interpretation.<\/p>\n

Teaching is complicated. Learning is complicated. PEOPLE are complicated.<\/p>\n

So, any time we do research about people teaching and learning, we’re looking at\u00a0enormously<\/strong> complicated questions.<\/p>\n

Some disagreement is inevitable<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And — here’s the surprise — the fact that we found contradictions means that we’ve been looking hard enough. (If I didn’t find contradictory research, I probably haven’t looked very hard…)<\/p>\n

What, then, should we do to resolve the (inevitable, helpful) contradictions?<\/p>\n

One useful step:\u00a0get granular<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In this case: presumably some kinds of animations<\/em> are helpful under some kinds of circumstances<\/em>. But others: not so much.<\/p>\n

We need to know more about the specifics<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Okay,\u00a0Some Specifics<\/h2>\n

With that in mind, I found a more recent study<\/a> trying to understand when and why<\/em> animations might hinder understanding.<\/p>\n

The study, in effect, looked at two questions:<\/p>\n

Are the animations essential to understanding the topic, or are they basically “decorative”?<\/p>\n

and<\/p>\n

Is the material being studied cognitively challenging<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Two scholars — Annabel Pink and Philip Newton — had students study slides with information on them. Some\u00a0slides had animations; others didn’t.<\/p>\n

And — useful to know — the slides covered complex material: human physiology and enzyme kinetics.<\/p>\n

Sure enough, students remembered LESS information from the slides with animations. And they rated those slides as cognitively MORE challenging.<\/p>\n

In other words:<\/p>\n

When deciding whether or not to break out the GIFs, we can ask ourselves:<\/p>\n

Am I just decorating the slide, or does\u00a0animation help clarify the meaning of the material?<\/p>\n

and<\/p>\n

Is this material a cognitive heavy lift?<\/p>\n

When I ask these questions about my\u00a0working memory overload GIF, I arrive at these answers:<\/p>\n

The GIF illustrates a complex\u00a0process<\/em>: it’s not decorative,<\/em> but meaningfully connected to an understanding of the ideas.<\/p>\n

BUT<\/p>\n

The ideas are — in fact — quite complicated.<\/p>\n

The animation, in other words, might add cognitive load to an already mentally challenging concept. Hence the teachers’ unhappiness.<\/p>\n

Small, Medium, and Big Pictures<\/h2>\n

What should we teachers do with this information?<\/p>\n

Narrowly<\/strong> stated, we can consistently ask the two questions above: a) is the animation “decorative”? and b) is the material cognitively challenging?<\/p>\n

If either answer is “yes,” then we should hesitate to add animations.<\/p>\n

More broadly<\/strong>, we should continue to look for detailed guidance about when to use<\/em>, and when to\u00a0avoid<\/em>\u00a0using, animations to help students learn.<\/p>\n

As far as I can tell, we just don’t have a clear picture about the boundary conditions within which they help students learn.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0big picture<\/strong> looks like this.<\/p>\n

Psychology research rarely gives us an absolute, definitive answer to questions like: “should we add animations or not?”<\/p>\n

Teachers always need to look at research specifics<\/em>, compare them to the classroom conditions<\/em> where we work, and use our own expert judgment<\/em> to analyze the goodness of fit.<\/p>\n

\n

Mayer, R. E., Hegarty, M., Mayer, S., & Campbell, J. (2005). When static media promote active learning: annotated illustrations versus narrated animations in multimedia instruction.. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 11(4), 256-265. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1037\/1076-898x.11.4.256<\/p>\n

Berney, S., & B\u00e9trancourt, M. (2016). Does animation enhance learning? A meta-analysis.\u00a0Computers & Education<\/i>,\u00a0101<\/i>, 150-167.<\/p>\n

Pink, A., & Newton, P. M. (2020). Decorative animations impair recall and are a source of extraneous cognitive load.\u00a0Advances in Physiology Education<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently I discussed working memory overload\u00a0with a group of wise and thoughtful teachers. I showed them one of my favorite GIFs: a glass (representing working memory), slowly filling up with stuff (teaching methods, complex information), so that there is ultimately no room left in the glass (that is: no room left for understanding). VOILA: working […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":7328,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[211,101],"class_list":["post-7322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lb-blog","tag-animation","tag-dual-coding"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7322"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7330,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7322\/revisions\/7330"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}