Animated presentation of pictorial and concept map media in biology

Intelligent tutoring systems are beginning to include more varied forms of media, but little is known about how to choose the appropriate media and whether or not it should be animated. This study used a 2 (animated/static) x 2 (picture/concept map) factorial design in order to evaluate the effect of animation and media type on conceptual knowledge, relational knowledge, and free recall. Learners on Mechanical Turk (N = 208) were exposed to one of four conditions in which they viewed a modified Khan Academy video on cell parts. We found that animation induced higher learning gains when it comes to relational knowledge. For conceptual knowledge, animated concept maps outperformed animated pictures while static pictures produced slightly more learning than static concept maps. Our results indicate that using animations to slowly build complexity in visual displays is particularly important when the displays have a rich structure as in concept maps. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland