Effectiveness of Timeline Pacing as a Post-production Cueing Strategy in an Educational Three-Dimensional Animation for Undergraduate Medical Students: A Randomized Controlled Trial

摘要

Over the past decade, the use of three-dimensional (3D) animations in higher learning has been on the increase (Azer 2007; Mayer and Moreno 2002), and, like most educational material, the effectiveness of these teaching aids depends heavily on the quality of their design (Lowe 2004). Since animations have the potential to distract students from the intended message (Choules 2007), designers need to actively manipulate the way content is presented to guide students to relevant information. nThis manipulation, or cueing of content, although useful in all types of instruction, is particularly important to the design of instructional 3D animations because of their linear, often non-interactive nature, which makes controlling the rate of learning in classroom settings difficult. Current types of successful cueing techniques used by animation designers include narration (Mayer and Anderson 1991, 1992); overt changes in the characteristics of the focal objects such as changes in form (transformation), position (translation), and inclusion (transition) (Lowe 2003; Rensink 2000); and surface structure such as colour, texture, and level of detail (Weiss et al. 2002; Wilson-Pauwels 1997).