Learning with instructional animations may overstretch limited working memory resources due to intense processing demands associated with transient information. The authors investigated whether explicit instructional advice coupled with a task-specific learner control mechanism (such as a timeline scrollbar) could facilitate the successful…

Students in 4 Canadian high school physics classes completed instructional sequences in two key physics topics related to motion--Straight Line Motion and Newton's First Law. Different sequences of laboratory investigation, teacher explanation (lecture) and the use of computer-based scientific visualizations (animations and simulations) were…

Twenty-two college students in science education were given an adjunctive computer-assisted instruction (CAI) program by means of typewriter consoles and computer-controlled colored slide presentations of critical information. Students were pretested, told how to respond at the student console, taught by the Harvard CAI System, and posttested. The…

A computer-assisted instruction (CAI) physics lesson on magnetism was supplemented with slides and film loops to provide a simulated encounter with simple magnetism experiments. Two groups of students took the CAI lesson, but one group viewed the simulated experiments, while the other group performed the actual laboratory experiments. Since…

The purpose of the research was to manipulate two aspects of genetics instruction in order to measure their effects on college, introductory biology students' achievement in genetics. One instructional sequence that was used dealt first with monohybrid autosomal inheritance patterns, then sex-linkage. The alternate sequence was the reverse.…

Turtle graphics is a popular vehicle for introducing children to computer programming. Children combine simple graphic commands to get a display screen cursor (called a turtle) to draw designs on the screen. The purpose of this study was to examine young children's abilities to function in a simple computer programming environment. Four- and…