Despite the widespread use of whiteboard animations in both academic and informal settings, little evidence exists about their efficacy and impact on learner experiences, especially in non-STEM fields such as the social sciences. This study examined the effects of whiteboard animations against three other instructional formats on comprehension,…

COVID-19 has shown us what it means to be isolated, disconnected and alone. As the post-pandemic academic world rebuilds itself, we will need to get serious about communicating diversity, inclusion and belonging to an ever-wider group of people in education. Visual communication is the key to conveying universally understood content that is highly…

We present a system that automatically generates deictic gestures for animated pedagogical agents (APAs). The system takes audio and text as input, which define what the APA has to say, and generates animated gestures based on a set of rules. The automatically generated gestures point to the exact locations of elements on a whiteboard nearby the…

COMPASS is an e-learning system that can visualize grammar errors during sentence production in German as a first or second language. Via drag-and-drop dialogues, it allows users to freely select word forms from a lexicon and to combine them into phrases and sentences. The system's core component is a natural-language generator that, for every new…

The purpose of the study was to compare 2D and 3D visual presentation styles, both still frame and animation, on subjects' brain activity measured by the amplitude of EEG alpha wave and on their recall to see if alpha power and recall differ significantly by depth and movement of visual presentation style and by spatial intelligence. In addition,…

The effects of dynamic and static visualizations in understanding physical principles of fish locomotion were investigated. Seventy-five students were assigned to one of three conditions: a text-only, a text with dynamic visualizations, or a text with static visualizations condition. During learning, subjects were asked to think aloud. Learning…

This study investigated the effectiveness of three different levels of enhancement strategies utilized to facilitate students' learning from static and animated visualization when taking the time-on-task into consideration. Participants were randomly assigned to six treatment groups, and then took four criterion measures. The time-on-task was…

This study investigates the effects of using both specific labels and diagrammatic arrows in the animation of salt dissolution. Four different versions of the animation served as treatments that were developed based upon principles of educational technology and cognitive psychology. The researchers studied the effects of spatial ability (high or…

When visualization tools utilized in computer programming education have been evaluated empirically, the results have remained controversial. To address this problem, we have developed a model of short-term effects of program animation, and used it in a series of experiments. In the current experiment, we varied visual representation of an…