The effectiveness of animations containing two novel forms of animation cueing that target relations between event units rather than individual entities was compared with that of animations containing conventional entity-based cueing or no cues. These relational event unit cues ("progressive path" and "local coordinated" cues) were specifically…

The educational advantages of inquiry learning environments that incorporate modelling facilities are often challenged by students' poor inquiry skills. This study examined two types of model progression as means to compensate for these skill deficiencies. Model order progression (MOP), the predicted optimal variant, gradually increases the…

A central goal of the learning sciences is to discover principles that determine the optimal amount of instructional assistance to support robust learning (Koedinger & Aleven, 2007). We examined learning outcomes from providing and withholding stepwise instructional explanations as students studied worked examples and solved physics problems. We…

The goal of the present study was to examine the mechanisms underlying a strategy that we developed to make instructional explanations effective. In two experiments participants learned about plate tectonics from a multimedia material, including adjunct explanations that revised common misunderstandings. These explanations were either marked…

The time course of learners' processing of a complex animation was studied using a dynamic diagram of a piano mechanism. Over successive repetitions of the material, two forms of cueing (standard colour cueing and anti-cueing) were administered either before or during the animated segment of the presentation. An uncued group and two other control…

Two complementary studies, one in the laboratory and one in the field, compared the usage patterns and the effectiveness of interactive videos and illustrated textbooks when German secondary school students learned complex content. For this purpose, two videos affording different degrees of interactivity and a content-equivalent illustrated…

Students are frequently presented with novel visualizations introducing scientific concepts and processes normally unobservable to the naked eye. Despite being unfamiliar, students are expected to understand and employ the visualizations to solve problems. Domain experts exhibit more competency than novices when using complex visualizations, but…

Two experiments examined visual attention distribution in learning from text and pictures. Participants watched a 16-step multimedia instruction on the formation of lightning. In Experiment 1 (N=90) the instruction was system-paced (fast, medium, slow pace), while it was self-paced in Experiment 2 (N=31). In both experiments the text modality was…

Two experiments used eye tracking to investigate a novel cueing approach for directing learner attention to low salience, high relevance aspects of a complex animation. In the first experiment, comprehension of a piano mechanism animation containing spreading-colour cues was compared with comprehension obtained with arrow cues or no cues. Eye…

To examine how visual attentional resources are allocated when learning from a complex animation about the cardiovascular system, eye movements were registered in the absence and presence of visual cues. Cognitive processing was assessed using cued retrospective reporting, whereas comprehension and transfer tests measured the quality of the…

Whereas product-oriented worked examples only present a problem solution, process-oriented worked examples additionally explain the rationale behind the presented solution. Given the importance of understanding this rationale for attaining transfer, process-oriented worked examples would be expected to result in more efficient transfer. However, a…

New technologies enable flexible combinations of text and interactive or non-interactive pictures. The aim of the present study was to investigate (a) whether adding pictures to texts is generally beneficial for learning or whether it can also have detrimental effects, (b) how interactivity of pictures affects learning, (c) whether the…

Fourteen high-intelligence and 13 low-intelligence first-year college students worked in a structured or unstructured simulation environment to learn correlational principles. Thinking-aloud protocols indicate that high-intelligence subjects exhibit a better working method than do low-intelligence subjects, and that working method is a strong…