January 2007 - December 2009
Pact for Research and Innovation of the Competition Fond 2006 of the Leibniz-Association
The basic idea of the research project was that a successful knowledge acquisition with dynamic visualizations is a resource intensive process which requires simultaneous and optimized availability of different learning resources. This particularly comprises different processing capabilities of the cognitive system, functionalities of the applied computer technology and didactically substantiated contents and representations. Accordingly, the instructional potential of dynamic visualizations can only effectively evolve if these different learning resources are available in a coordinated way for a concrete knowledge acquisition scenario. This hypothesis was investigated in formal learning settings (e.g. school, university) as well as in informal learning settings (e.g. aquarium, diving excursion) for a natural sciences domain, the locomotion of fish.
International comparative educational studies (PISA, TIMSS) have clearly shown that the performances of German pupils could be improved considerably in natural sciences, particularly in the area of understanding complex dynamic relations. Understanding difficulties in natural sciences often refers to the complexity, speed or scale of dynamic contexts and the balancing act between concrete object configurations and the underlying abstract of scientific concepts and theories.
With the domain fish locomotion, a particularly suitable content area has been singled out to test the instructional capability of dynamic visualizations for the understanding of scientific relations, because
Concrete subject matters of the domain, with which the effectiveness for learning of dynamic visualizations were tested, are i.e. the classification of different fish locomotion forms and the underlying physical principles and forces of fish locomotion. These two contents are also basic elements to understand the relations of evolutionary adaptation of various fishes and the associated fish movements.
The aim of the project was to support the understanding of complex dynamic processes in the Natural Sciences. Thereby we drew attention to conducive design of dynamic visualizations while considering and developing findings from cognitive and media psychology. Within this context we studied the following topics:
Several studies aimed at pros and cons of dynamic and static visualizations and the question which degree of realism a conducive learning environment should have. Furthermore, we studied process-oriented approaches of visualization processing (eye-tracking, verbal protocols), the function of prior knowledge (different expertise levels) as well as the training of these processes via eye movement modeling.