Abstracts - Earli

well as interactive participants who used the visualization effectively and better than interactiveparticipants who used the visualization ineffectively. Spatial ability predicted performance in allexperiments, but its contribution was independent of the effects of interactivity. The findingsindicate that behavior in complex interactive tasks is determined both by the properties of externalrepresentations and by the properties of individual users. The results indicate the importance ofindividual differences for theories of distributed cognition and for the design and implementationof interactive tools in education and other domains.Focusing prospective teachers’ attention on relevant procedural knowledge: The effects ofsignaling and segmenting instructional videos and animationsRoxana Moreno, University of New Mexico, USAProspective teachers learned about teaching principles either with or without (control group) avideo (Experiment 1) or a classroom animation (Experiment 2) illustrating how an expert teacherapplied such principles to her classroom. It was hypothesized that directing attention to relevantdynamic information with signaling (group SI) and/or segmenting (group SE) the video/animationinto smaller chunks of information would facilitate students’ learning. Across both experiments,the control group outperformed SI and SE groups on a conceptual test but underperformed mostvideo/animation groups on a high-order test in which students were asked to identify and evaluateteaching skills in a novel classroom video/animation. SE groups outperformed no-SE groups onconceptual, retention, and high-order tests. Measures of students’ learning perceptions suggest thatthe benefits of the SE method reside on cognitive load reduction. The findings encouragesegmenting instructional videos and animations into small chunks to help novice students learnfrom complex dynamic visualizations.– 191 –