Gestures in Instructional Animations: A Helping Hand to Understanding Non‐human Movements?

Abstract

Recent research on dynamic visualizations suggests that these visualizations are effective for learning human movements such as knot tying or paper folding. Using embodied theories of cognition, this study investigated whether learning non-human movements from a dynamic visualization can also be enhanced by grounding these movements in the learner's motor system. University students viewed an animation on lightning formation, and followed the animation's movements with gestures, saw an on-screen human hand follow the movements or saw an arrow follow the movements. Results showed that observing an onscreen human hand following the movements in the animation, but not actually performing these movements, enhanced retention and transfer performance compared with watching the animation without gestures. This suggests that observation of human hand movement in animation-based instruction, which plays an important role in learning of procedural-motor tasks, can also improve people's learning from other dynamic systems.

Effects of Gestures on Older Adults' Learning from Video‐based Models

“…Furthermore, all age groups had performed better and experienced less mental effort on the simple versus the complex problems, which indicates that our measures were sensitive to variations in complexity and cognitive load. Although our design has proven to be valid in manipulating task complexity and sensitive to detect an effect of age, the results showed almost no effect of gestures, which is not in line with previous studies that did show a positive effect of observing gestures on learning (De Koning & Tabbers, 2013) and problem solving (Lozano & Tversky, 2006). This difference might be caused by the type of task used; De Koning and Tabbers (2013) did not look into problem solving, and Lozano and Tversky (2006) used a more concrete type of problem solving (assembly of a simple object).…”

Hand Gesture and Mathematics Learning: Lessons From an Avatar

“…For example, De Koning and Tabbers (2013) compared visual signaling via an arrow and via a picture of a pointing hand and found learning benefits associated with viewing the pointing hand. Similarly, Johnson and colleagues (De Koning & Tabbers, 2013) found that students with low prior knowledge benefitted more from agent gesture than from an arrow.…”

Giving Learning a Helping Hand: Finger Tracing of Temperature Graphs on an iPad

“…In a large field experiment, Piasta et al (2012) found that the use of preschool teachers' print references enhanced children's early literacy skills, including reading, spelling, and comprehension, 2 years after the intervention's conclusion. Other recent multimedia-based studies with adult participants have found improved learning when attention-capturing signals such as animated cursors were replaced with images of the human hand pointing (e.g., Atkinson et al 2009;Castro-Alonso et al 2014;de Koning and Tabbers 2013), or an animated avatar pointing to specific aspects of on-screen information (Mayer and DaPra 2012;Moreno et al 2010).…”