This project explores how students learn from 3D animated and/or interactive visualizations and aims to understand which design choices are most effective in fostering learning of complex, dynamic events. The focus of the study is to 1) gain a better understanding of how animation/interactivity design choices can impact learning in undergraduate molecular biology and 2) how to effectively engage and impact the communities most directly involved in either producing or consuming this kind of media. The work is based on a pilot study that explored the role of visual complexity in helping students understand concepts such as diffusion, conformational change, and molecular crowding. Although increasing the level of visual complexity of the animations was effective in conveying the dynamic nature of the molecular world, students still had difficulty understanding the random nature of molecular events and tended to anthropomorphize the motion of molecules shown in the animations.
Intellectual merit: This study is uncovering key visual and auditory variables that significantly impact undergraduate students' understanding of abstract molecular concepts (e.g. the effects of temperature and molecular crowding on protein conformational flexibility and diffusion). A strength of the project is that the team includes content experts to ensure content accuracy and to validate student learning outcomes, animation experts to translate findings into visual materials, and experts in assessment to help design the tools and processes for informing the content, graphic design and visualization experts. The implications of this work are potentially transformative in that the study offers insight into the role visualizations play in learning complex concepts, and provides broadly applicable guidelines to help both educators and media designers in the design and use of complex 3D visualizations in ways that maximize their pedagogical value.
Broader impact: The design principles and the visualizations themselves are being widely disseminated to an audience of students, educators, and media designers through a combination of web-based channels and hands-on workshops. Broader impacts are expected on multiple levels: 1) instructors who make better choices in the selection and use of media in the classroom (as well as during their involvement in developing educational tools), 2) media developers and animators who design more pedagogically impactful visualizations, and 3) students who become better consumers of educational media with the aid of appropriate classroom discussion activities that promote a more critical appraisal of visualization materials.
This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts toward Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education.
