The use of animation and audio as a virtual panacea for everything from advertising to educational videos and instruction has created the presumption that any materials that use them 'must be better!' Now doubt that the addition of animation can improve message delivery on a number of scales, but the use of animation regardless of message and with…

The purpose of this study was to test the principle of modality by using audio to deliver verbal information when that information is designed to support non-verbal information such as animations in a computer-based lesson. This was done by comparing the effect of two types of audio support mechanisms- a simple support mechanism consisting of…

The choice of what to include in educational software is an issue with which instructional designers are regularly concerned. Multimedia capacity, standard on today's desktop computers, gives designers the opportunity to provide learners a more exciting learning experience than simply looking, clicking, and then looking some more. One feature that…

Animation is being used extensively for instructional purposes; however, it has not been found to be effective on measures of higher order learning (concepts, rules, procedures) within the knowledge acquisition and knowledge integration domains. The purpose of this study was to examine the instructional effectiveness of two visual scaffolding…