ABSTRACT
Comprehension difficulties in the natural sciences often seem to result from the complexity, speed or scale of dynamic phenomena under consideration and from the necessity to relate the observation of the concrete objects involved in these dynamic phenomena to the underlying abstract scientific concepts and theories. To address this type of comprehension difficulty, educators regularly use external visual representations like graphs, pictures, videos or animations when teaching scientific concepts and phenomena. From a psychological perspective, this approach can be justified by referring to the finding that instructional visualisations enable a direct and parsimonious access to visuospatial information (Larkin & Simon, 1987) and facilitate inferences grounded in perception (Goldstone & Son, 2005). It can thus be postulated that instructional visualisations are particularly well suited to conveying an understanding of complex visuospatial relations that are an important characteristic of many scientific domains. Another line of reasoning pertains to the claim that the use of instructional visualisations is particularly helpful when the entities under consideration are difficult or even impossible to observe in the real world. Many scientific phenomena involve this type of entities, which are not directly accessible to perception because they are too small, too big, too fast, too slow, or too complex (Park & Gittelman, 1992). In this paper, however, we will not cover the general issue of whether and when visualisations are useful to support (science) learning. Instead, we will address a more specific question, namely, under what conditions various types of visualisations turn out to be beneficial (e.g., Tversky, Bauer-Morrison, & Bétrancourt, 2002). In particular, we will focus on the comparison between static and dynamic visualisations with regard to their potential to support the comprehension of complex dynamic phenomena in the natural sciences. We will first introduce some theoretical considerations and empirical findings with regard to the drawbacks and advantages of static and dynamic
visualisations. In the remainder of the chapter, we will provide an overview of four studies that we conducted in the biological domain of fish locomotion to compare static and dynamic visualisations with regard to varying learning objectives.
