Looking Across Instead of Back and Forth: How the Simultaneous Presentation of Multiple Animation Episodes Facilitates Learning

Many learning tasks require students to induce higher-order relationships from the learning material. Compare and contrast processes play a pivotal role in solving such inductive tasks. Different presentations of animation episodes offer affordances to students that can either impede or facilitate compare and contrast processes. While conventional behaviorally realistic animations typically present multiple episodes one after the other, i.e. sequentially, simultaneous presentation offers a feasible alternative. We investigated how the sequential and simultaneous presentation of multiple animation episodes affects students’ perceptual interrogation of the animation as well as their learning …