Direct-manipulation animation: incorporating the haptic channel in the learning process to support middle school students in science learning and mental model acquisition

The study reported here investigated what learners need to construct and master mental models of systems. To enable learners to perform the cognitive processing needed to understand structure, purposes, and functional relations among system entities, we developed a special form of animation: Direct-manipulation animation. Furthermore, we propose a cognitive processing model that elucidates the process of learning with information presented through auditory, visual, and haptic channels. To answer our research questions, an empirical study was conducted with 157 seventh-grade public school students, who were asked to learn about Newtonian mechanics with narrative-only, narrative-and-static-visuals, or narrative-and-animation. The effect of content complexity on learning with different presentation formats was also examined. Our findings suggest that direct-manipulation animation, incorporating the haptic channel in the learning process, provided learners with proper learning experiences to reason about structural causal interactions and functional relations in systems; this in turn facilitated acquisition of mental models of systems.

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