Animation: a tool to improve the comprehension of dynamic phenomena? The contributions of animations in a learning process.

The goal of this thesis is to understand under which conditions educational material using animations supports learning; more specifically under which conditions understanding dynamic phenomena compared to static illustrations occurs. Numerous factors need to be taken into account. Our first study is a meta-analysis on the use of animations compared to static illustrations in a learning context. Our goal is to investigate the effect brought by animations as well as the underlying cognitive processes involved. The initial results support the hypothesis that animations have a beneficial effect on learning of dynamic phenomena, and show higher performances with factual and conceptual knowledge than with procedural knowledge. Our first experiment will allow us to investigate the impact learning with animations will have on the information extraction process of conceptual versus procedural knowledge. Our second experiment will focus on the effect of cueing, as an offset strategy, on the learner’s individual capacities such as prior knowledge or visual-spatial capacities. A last experiment will further detail the role of the different knowledge types, the individual cognitive abilities and the attentional signalling (cueing).