Cyberlearning at Community Colleges!www.c3cyberlearning.ning.com!

The use of animations in undergraduate biology education: Going beyond the content!

!Justin Pruneski ! Sam Donovan!

Dept. of Biological Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260!

Introduction!!Computer animations are often used in biology courses to help students visualize complicated biological processes and concepts. Animations can facilitate understanding of complex spatial and temporal relationships that are difficult to depict in static images. Education research supports the claim that animations can lead to increased student learning and identifies features that make animations effective. Given the wide variety of high quality animations freely available to educators on the web, the challenge is finding creative and effective ways to tap into their potential for learning. We generally present animations didactically, as self-evident resources rather than leveraging them to support student-centered active learning.  Here, we review the use of animations in undergraduate biology education, and make recommendations on how they can be used more effectively to support student learning. Through methods such as scaffolding student analysis of animations, increasing their understanding of visual literacy, and using multiple representations students can begin to use animations as a tool to support their own learning, rather than simply a source of content. !

Animations are a wealth of biological information!!With the proper scaffolding and media literacy, students can extract a great deal of information from animations depicting biological processes. The outline below is an attempt to map out some of the categories of information that can be used to structure the ways that students interact with the animations. Some of these will be more meaningful for certain processes (and animations) than others. The example assignment shown on the right, can use questions that highlight or draw studentsʼ attention to any of the features listed below. !!1.  Concepts!

a.  Overview of biological concept or process !b.  Details of concept or process!c.  Common misconceptions !

2.  Elements or parts!a.  Necessary parts !b.  Relative numbers of parts !c.  Absolute numbers of parts !d.  Missing parts !e.  Representations of parts!f.  Colors/textures and other “surface features” !g.  Resolution or level of detail !h.  Noise !

3.  Temporal features!a.  Ordering !b.  Dependency !c.  Relative time of steps !d.  Absolute time of process!

4.  Spatial features!a.  Location!b.  Positioning !c.  Connections or interactions !d.  Relative sizes !e.  Absolute sizes!

Sources of quality animations!The widespread use of animations in biology education has led to increased development and availability of quality animations on a wide range of biological topics. A sample of digital libraries and other online sources of free animations are included below. Many textbooks also provide animations via their websites or CD-ROMs. !

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 0937791 & 0737474.!!Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.  

References and resources!!

Borgman, C. (2008). Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge. Report of the NSF Taskforce on Cyberlearning. NSF, Arlington, VA.!

Brewer, C. and Smith, D. (eds.)(2011). Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action. AAAS, Washington D.C.!

Center for New Media Literacy [http://www.medialit.org/]!Mayer, R.E. and Moreno, R. (2002) Animation as an Aid to Multimedia Learning. Educational Psychology

Review. 14.1:87-99.!McClean, P. et al. (2005) Molecular and Cellular Biology Animations: Development and Impact on Student

Learning. Cell Biology Education. 4:169-179.!OʼDay D.H. (2007) The Value of Animations in Biology Teaching: A Study of Long-Term Memory

Retention. CBE – Life Science Education. 6:217-223.!Stith, B.J. (2004) Use of Animation in Teaching Cell Biology. Cell Biology Education. 3:181-188.!UNESCO (2004) The Plurality of Literacy and its Implications for Policies and Programmes: Position

Paper. !!

Example activity: using multiple animations to engage students in content and media literacy!

Now that there is a wealth of quality animations available to educators, finding animations to use in class is generally not a problem, but finding creative and effective uses for the animations is still a major challenge. Instead of trying to find the “perfect” animation that communicates all of the essential concepts in a clear and effective manner, the focus should be on using animations to engage students in the learning process. The example assignment shown below takes advantage of the many different representations of the same biological processes that can be harvested from the web. After viewing three different animations, students answer questions regarding how each video portrayed a certain aspect of the topic. They can examine the level of detail of each video and why certain features were portrayed as they were. Research has shown that animations only facilitate learning of the specific features or concepts highlighted by the animation and do not necessarily help understanding of related features or concepts that were not a focus of the animation. By examining multiple animations, the students get different perspectives that can fill these knowledge gaps and combine to enhance their understanding of the subject. Given as an assignment outside of the classroom, this activity allows students to spend an increased amount of time engaging with the animations without taking up valuable class time or requiring class multimedia setup. This practice gives the student more engagement with the material, rather than simply watching a single video. !

Select research on the uses and benefits of animations!

!With the increased use of animations as a teaching tool, many educators have aimed their scholarly research efforts at questions such as, what makes animations high quality? how can they be created easily? how can they be used effectively? and what is their impact on student learning? One series of educational psychology studies by Richard Mayer and colleagues (reviewed in Mayer and Moreno 2002) details many features that make animations more effective, including adding narration and appropriate labels, which is useful for those developing new animations. Similar work from McClean et al. (2005) describes the creation of a collection of animations dealing with a number of molecular and cellular topics. They test the impact of one of their animations on student learning and demonstrate a significant positive effect when the animation is added to a lecture and used as a study guide following lecture. This study and others reinforce the point that for students to fully benefit from animations, they have to be able to view them more than once and they should be combined with other teaching methods such as lecture in order to reinforce learning. Other research has tested how incorporating pre-existing animations into classes can increase student understanding. Studies by Stith (2004) and OʼDay (2007) demonstrate increased quiz scores, both immediately and three weeks after being presented material that includes animations. Research studies like these testing the impact of animations in biology education may be few in number, but they consistently see positive results of using animation compared to lectures without them or compared to static textbook images and argue for further research in the future. !!

View each of the following animations and answer the questions. You may want to keep them open in separate browser windows so you can move back and forth between them.!  #1 !#2 #3!!!!!!! !!!#1 Clip from PBS production DNA: The secret of life ! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41_Ne5mS2ls&feature=related!#2 Patty Hain and Nathan Wambaugh: University of Nebraska http://www-class.unl.edu/biochem/gp2/m_biology/animation/gene/gene_a2.html!#3 Learn Genetics: University of Utah !http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/dna/firefly/!!1. For each animation describe how the RNA Polymerase is depicted. Which depiction do you think is most accurate. Which one is most helpful for understanding the process?! !2. The table below lists 3 key biological features that are important for gene expression. Rank the animations on how clearly they represent the process.!!!!!!!!!!!!3. Where in the eukaryotic cell do the processes of transcription and translation take place? Compare and contrast how the animations represented this feature.!!4. These animations show one polypeptide chain at a time being produced from the mRNA molecule, but typically multiple proteins would be produced from a single mRNA molecule simultaneously. How could this have been depicted?!

 ! Animation #1!

Animation #2!

Animation #3!

3 key biological features! Rank the animations for each feature.!

1. The RNA Polymerase is recruited to a geneʼs regulatory elements (promoter). !

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2. Transcription and translation occur at different times and at different locations within the cell. !

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3. tRNA molecules bring amino acids to the mRNA in order for the ribosome to assemble the polypeptide chain. !

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http://vcell.ndsu.nodak.edu/animations/ North Dakota State University - Virtual Cell Animation Collection!http://www.wehi.edu.au/education/wehitv Walter + Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research – WEHI.TV!http://www.dnalc.org/resources/3d/ Cold Spring Harbor Laboratoryʼs Dolan DNA Learning Center – 3D Animation Library!http://telstar.ote.cmu.edu/biology/animation/index.html Carnegie Mellon – Animating Biology!http://www.johnkyrk.com/index.html John Kyrk – Animated Overview of Cell Biology Fundamentals!http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/animations/index.html HHMI BioInteractive!!

Helping students develop media literacy!!

What it means to be literate is evolving rapidly to incorporate modes of communication and information access afforded by networked computers. The development of life long science learning skills requires more than textual literacy —  the conventions used for decoding (reading) and encoding (writing) text. Interpreting information in an electronic environment involves the "ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts” (UNESCO, 2004). The skills associated with evaluating media are sometimes called, “new media literacies”. The Center for Media Literacy emphasizes recognizing:!

•  All media messages are constructed!•  There are specialized creative languages (norms and conventions) used to

shape media products!•  Different people experience the same media message differently!•  Media have embedded values and points of view (CML, 2011).!

Recognizing these ideas and relating them to animations can help students take a more active role in decoding the messages in the animation and understanding some of the decisions that were made in their construction. For example, animations of biological processes are generally created with the intent of simplifying the information to make it more accessible. Students studying an animation may ask - In what ways does this representation simplify the process being displayed? What has been left out? What is the main focus of this representation? How does this representation communicate its main points? Additionally, animations may have features (shapes, colors, movements) that are designed to be realistic and others that are chosen to communicate a particular idea. Students studying an animation might ask - Are these colors tied to biological information or are they just used to help organized the material? Why are these shapes used? What is accurate about the movements shown? What is stylized or metaphorical?!!

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