Investigating the role of hand perspective when learning knot tying from instructional animations.
Creators: name: Marcus, Nadine
name: Mok, Katrina
name: Ayres, Paul
name: Van Gog, Tamara
Publisher: name: UNSW Sydney
Year: 2019

description: Introduction: This study investigates the effectiveness of learning a knot tying motor-task from video based instructional animations, with differing view-perspectives. Previous research found first person perspective animated assembly instructions (Fiorella et al, 2017) and animated knot tying instructions (Garland &amp; Sanchez, 2013) led to better learning when compared to equivalent third person perspective animations. Moreover, Marcus et al. (2013) found that viewing hands while learning to tie knots from animations, led to more instructionally efficient learning outcomes. Our study is an extension of previous view-perspective research with a focus on different knot tying tasks and the inclusion of a no hands control group. We are also interested whether gender or spatial ability may interact with the different view-perspective presentation formats. Our main hypothesis is that first person perspective (FP) will lead to superior learning than both third person (TP) and no hands first person perspective (NP). We also hypothesize that spatial ability will correlate with performance in all groups and that males who tend to have higher spatial abilities could outperform females. Method: Sixty UNSW students (30 male, 30 female) were randomly assigned to three view-perspective groups: referred to as FP, TP and NP, with each group containing equal number of males and females. Participants completed a mental rotation test to measure spatial ability. They then had to learn how to tie two different knots of varying complexity, from observing the video twice. All groups had equal learning time. Students were tested on their ability to reproduce the knots. They also completed cognitive load subjective ratings and multiple choice questions designed to measure both recognition of steps and transfer of knowledge to next and previous steps. Results: The results demonstrated superiority of FP over TP in both knot-tying performance and instructional efficiency, which is a measure that combines performance and cognitive load. There was no overall significant difference between FP over NP. Males demonstrated superior spatial abilities to females but these did not translate to any significant overall differences in view-perspective groups. However, males did outperform females in one of the knots for both TP and NP, and within the FP group for one of the MC tasks. There was also a medium level correlation between spatial ability test scores and knot tying scores in each view-perspective group for the easy Truckers Hitch knot (r = .302, p = .019) and the more difficult Bowline knot (r = 0.368, p = .004). A repeated measures ANOVA between view-perspective and gender groups on knot scores of Trucker's Hitch and Bowline knots with a covariate of spatial ability, revealed a significant three-way interaction between Knots, Perspective and Gender (F(2, 53) = 6.209, p = .004, ηp² = .190), which suggests that both perspective and gender interact with knot scores. Conclusion: Our results provide additional support for the superiority of first person perspective to third person perspective. Moreover, for first person perspective the presence of hands did not make a significant difference. This suggests that videos of motor tasks should ideally be in first person-perspective with hands, or else first person perspective with no hands is an acceptable option. We suspect this is because when no hands are present, you can still infer the hands in a first person perspective. We also provide some support for the benefits of higher spatial abilities when learning from instructional animations, and some possible gender differences, with males outperforming females on a few tasks. References Fiorella, L., van Gog, T., Hoogerheide, V., &amp; Mayer, R. E. (2017). It’s All a Matter of Perspective: Viewing First-Person Video Modeling Examples Promotes Learning of an Assembly Task. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109, 653 – 665. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/edu0000161 Garland, T., &amp; Sanchez, C. (2013). Rotational perspective and learning procedural tasks from dynamic media. Computers &amp; Education, 69, 31-37. Marcus, N., Cleary, B., Wong, A., &amp; Ayres, P. (2013). Should hand actions be observed when learning hand motor skills from instructional animations? Computers in Human Behavior, 29, 2172-2178.
description: 12th International Cognitive Load theory conference; Maastricht, the Netherlands; 2019-06-17 - 2019-06-19