New Research Project

As I’ve been doing research (and as I’ve just been going to class) I’ve realized that one of the major intersections between the fields of animation and medicine is in education. Since I’ve started this blog, both my organic chemistry professor and my molecular biology professor have used animations to help us visualize new concepts. So I decided to do some more in-depth research on animation as a teaching tool, with an emphasis on teaching science, but also in education as a whole. I went into this project assuming that the answer was self-evident: of course animation is an excellent teaching tool that helps students learn, right? The answer, as it turns out, is this: Probably. But maybe not as much as we’d think.

 

The first thing my research revealed was that there hasn’t been enough research to form a concrete conclusion. In some studies, the use of animation did facilitate learning in the test subjects. But in other studies, the test scores for students who viewed an animation was not significantly higher than those of students who viewed static images or plain text. Some researchers have suggested an explanation for this discrepancy, namely that the effectiveness of animation as a teaching tool depends heavily on the nature of the material that the animation is trying to teach as well as on the amount of non-essential information in the animation that the students have to sift through to find the pertinent material.

So, in the light of this research, I’ve decided to conduct a small study of my own, partly with the hopes of contributing to the greater body of knowledge in this area, but also out of curiosity and because my findings may benefit me in my quest to reconcile my major and minor. Also, it’s a requirement for one of my classes. In order for it to be the most helpful and the least redundant, I’ve tried to choose a research question that focuses on a specific type of learning that animation might be used in. In other words, because it is likely that animations are more effective when teaching some topics than others, I’ve tried to choose a specific kind of topic to research. So, without further ado, here is the question that my research project will attempt to answer:

Are computer animations more effective than static images for helping students visualize and learn about the three-dimensional structure of organic molecules?

How, you might ask, do I plan on accomplishing this?  The answer: a combination of a survey and an experiment. Using primarily Facebook and email messages, I plan on asking friends, family members and classmates–a relatively large and diverse demographic–to participate. Half the people will view a short animation explaining the “chair” conformation of a cyclohexane molecule, which has a very particular three-dimensional shape. The other half will view a few static images of the molecule and be able to read some text explaining the images. Both groups will then answer questions designed to determine comprehension of what they have just watched or read, as well as a few questions regarding their experience with the animation or the static images and their own opinion as to the effectiveness of each as a teaching tool. For the majority of participants, the content will likely be completely new, making it easier to assess the animations effectiveness for teaching novel information about a particular three-dimensional structure.

Hopefully, there will be a relatively large number of people who respond and the results will be representative of the population as a whole. But we’ll see.

And if you want to know the results, subscribe to the RSS feed and I’ll post updates from time to time.