When Students Don’t Benefit From Attention Guidance in Animations: The Role of Working Memory in Learning From Animations

When Students Don’t Benefit From Attention Guidance in Animations: The Role of Working Memory in Learning From Animations Irene T. Skuballa (skuballa@psychologie.uni-freiburg.de) Rolf Schwonke (schwonke@psychologie.uni-freiburg.de) Alexander Renkl (renkl@psychologie.uni-freiburg.de) University of Freiburg, Department of Educational and Developmental Psychology, Engelbergerstr. 41, 79085 Freiburg, Germany meaningful learning that requires learners to actively select and organize relevant information in order to integrate it into existing schemata in long-term memory can be impeded. Motivated by possible disadvantages of animations, design factors have been proposed that aim at guiding learners’ visual attention (Ayres & Paas, 2007). We tested two promising ways of fostering attention guidance to relevant information in animations, namely instructional guidance by giving verbal instruction prior to the presentation of the animation and visual guidance by blurring out irrelevant information in the animation. In addition, we investigated the influence of working memory (WM) capacity on learning from animations with these two types of attention guidance. Abstract The present study examined how students’ working memory capacity influences learning from animations with or without guidance. We tested three different conditions: visual guidance, instructional guidance, and no guidance. The results show that especially visual guidance was perceived as being helpful for making references between narration and display of an animation. However, students without guidance outperformed both groups of students with guidance on a domain-specific knowledge test. A significant interaction between type of guidance and working memory capacity revealed that visual guidance impeded learning in students with high working memory capacity, whereas instructional guidance impeded learning in students with low working memory capacity. Our results suggest that working memory capacity is an important learner variable that should be taken into account to understand intervention effects and to customize learning environments to learners’ needs. Guidance in animations Keywords: learning; working memory capacity; animation. Instruction Introduction Animations can make unseen movements, interrelationships, and interdependencies or “difficult-to-see” particles and components in a system visible and thus accessible to comprehension. Animation can be defined as “a pictorial display that changes its structure or other properties over time and which triggers the perception of a continuous change” (Schnotz & Lowe, 2008, p. 304). This definition also pertains to dynamic visualizations, for example, presentations of how a technical device works or how a complex object is assembled. After a long line of research, nowadays there is no doubt that well-designed animations are helpful tools for fostering learning and transfer in different domains (Hoffler & Leutner, 2007; Linn, Chang, Chiu, Zhang, & McElhaney, 2011). Disadvantages of animations in the context of learning are grounded in their transitory and simultaneous nature. First, the presentation of entities in an animation is time-limited and subject to transience. This can hamper processing of important pieces of information, especially when the learner has not paid immediate attention to the relevant animated parts. Second, the simultaneity that characterizes one of animations’ advantages for learning is potentially also a pitfall. When a series of events takes place at the same time, learners’ limited capacities may be overwhelmed. Hence, Providing instructions on how to select and integrate information that is presented in different modes can have a positive effect on learners’ attention allocation and, thus, on learning processes. Instructions can be given before rather than during the presentation of a certain learning environment in order to avoid interference with the display of the learning contents during the actual learning phase. On the other hand, processes of recalling and maintaining the instructions during learning may “bind” WM capacities. In the context of multiple external representations, instructing learners on the functional relationships between representations can foster learning outcomes by guiding visual attention (Schwonke, Berthold, & Renkl, 2009). Gopher, Weil, and Siegel (1989) argue that mere prolonged exposure to a complex and dynamic task does not necessarily improve a learner’s performance. Instead, a complex task should be decomposed into subcomponents, and the focus of attention should be changed according to these predefined subcomponents. Computer game players who received instructions to focus on single sub-tasks—for example, first ship control and then mine handling— outperformed players without any instructions to change their focus (Gopher et al., 1989). When following these instructions, “by a systematic manipulation of emphasis on different task subelements, subjects were led to explore a