Michael Ready IDT 560 The effect of static and animated visualization: A perspective of instructional effectiveness and efficiency Introduction: In the paper, The effect of static and animated visualization: a perspective of instructional effectiveness and efficiency, Dwyer and Lin explain how their study investigates the effectiveness of enhanced strategies of teaching using static and animated visuals. They walk you through their process and show how the result of their study shows that animated visuals are more effective than static when it comes to higher-level learning. Previous Research: Animated visuals have been used before in higher-level learning but there has not been any research to definitively prove that they are superior over static visuals. A problem that is seen a lot in this type of research is that not every learner is the same. Not all students can focus on one type of visual and therefore cannot learn what information is provided. Because of this, a variety of strategies are required for those types of students. The Study: For their study, Dwyer and Lin decided to go “back to the basics” so to say. They decided to ask the learners questions after viewing the provided visual and see how much they can remember after a certain period of time. They are given immediate feedback as to whether or not they have “appropriately and accurately extracted the information displayed” (Dwyer & Lin, 2009). One of the reasons they decided to go with a question and feedback strategy is because they believe that by asking questions almost immediately after viewing the visual, it will help store the material in their long-term memory. They wanted to figure out if by asking questions and giving feedback after the learner viewed a complex animated visual of the heart system helped them retain information better than viewing the animation with no questions or feedback. There were two research groups, one that used static visuals, and the other animated. Each group was given a set of questions after viewing the visual. Some of the questions asked the learner to replicate what they saw, another asked them to simply label, and others asked questions about the terminology. The Result: As Dwyer and Lin hypothesized, the group with the animated visuals performed better than the group with static visuals. By using animated visuals, the learner can better understand direction, speed, and path of travel. Animated visuals improve the learners’ retention of the material. They also discovered that by asking questions and giving feedback the learner was able to recall the information more quickly than if they were not asked questions and given feedback.
Michael Ready IDT 560 My Opinion: This study proves something that I first noticed in my undergraduate work, that animated visuals are far superior to static visuals. The first time I realized this I was in biology class and we were learning about cells in plants and humans. The teacher provided an animated visual for the whole class and had us look at an illustration in our text. I was able to remember much more because of the animated visual rather than if I had just read the text and looked at the illustration provided. I believe that instruction can greatly be enhanced with the right animated visual. References: Lin, H., & Dwyer, F. M. (2010). The Effect of Static and Animated Visualization: A Perspective of Instructional Effectiveness and Efficiency. Educational Technology Research And Development, 58(2), 155-174.