Month: January 2021

Simple Overhead Draw-and-Talk Videos Are a Good Idea

Fiorella & Mayer (2016) conducted a series of experiments that show the effect of seeing diagrams being drawn vs. showing and/or pointing at already-drawn static diagrams in (short) video lectures. The paper appears to be a summary of a PhD project.

Seeing a diagram being drawn improves learning compared with instruction that uses a static, complete diagram, even if the instructor points at parts of it during their explanation. This is probably because the combination of drawing and talking naturally applies the multimedia learning principles of signalling, temporal contiguity, and segmenting.

Digital Khan-style videos where you see the lines appearing without the instructor’s hand were less effective than real life videos where you actually see the instructor that’s doing drawing. Seeing only the instructor’s hand seems to be slightly better than seeing their (upper) body.

From the conclusion:

Overall, this research suggests that observing the instructor draw diagrams promotes learning in part because it takes advantage of basic principles of multimedia learning, and that the presence of the instructor’s hand during drawing may provide an important social cue that motivates learners to make sense of the material.

In other words: making simple overhead draw-and-talk videos is a good idea.

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Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). Effects of observing the instructor draw diagrams on learning from multimedia messages. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(4), 528.

https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000065

Design Reports vs. Design Papers

One of the things I find difficult in design education is the difference between teaching our students the skill of doing design – coming up with and developing products, machines, and other plans – and teaching them the logic of how to argue for the results of that work – presenting, justifying, and giving reasons for their proposals.

We teach our students (some version of) the design process, and then we ask them to write a report that presents that process and their design. There is a tension in that combination. In this set-up it seems logical to show how your process ‘led to’ your design. Showing your (cleaned up, idealized) process is treated as the justification or support for the final design. But the quality of your process is not necessarily evidence for the quality of your design. Vice versa, with this approach it doesn’t make sense to present all your discarded ideas and other dead ends, or to show all seven and a half earlier versions of what became the final design. That would create a report that’s just as messy and chaotic as the average design process.

A ‘design report’ in this fashion tries to serve two functions: to provide evidence of learning activities, and to provide evidence for the final design’s quality. Those two sometimes conflict. At the very least they’re not the same and trying to do both in one document compromises the effect of both.

Perhaps, therefore, it would be good to make an explicit distinction between a ‘report’ and a ‘paper’? A report reports – it tells your teachers what happened. A paper presents – it describes a problem, shows evidence, and argues a proposal to a audience of peers.

If you want to see whether undergraduate students are learning the right skills and methods, ask them for a report. If you want graduate students to produce something similar to an academic paper, leave the reporting out of it.