Incorporating drawing as a learning activity to accompany textual information can be helpful for meeting learning outcomes compared to no drawing (Leutner & Schmeck, 2021). According to the drawing principle, the exercise of drawing allows students to engage in generative processing (Leutner & Schmeck, 2021) of text by establishing complex spatial relationships (Fiorella & Mayer, 2021).
Numerical data are commonly presented as tables or graphs (Ainsworth, 2021). Tables have the additional advantage of including non-numerical data, as exemplified in Table 1. A typical reason to display numerical data on a table is so that students can extract these values to perform calculations. Moreover, interactive tables on electronic platforms allow the viewer to sort the table entries in ascending or descending order according to the data in a column of choice. The sorted dataset ranks the entries and facilitates comparisons.
Let’s define “animation” as a medium that changes over time (i.e. dynamic) and appeals to the visual channel. Thus, animations can include cartoons depicting abstract topics or a video recording of the instructor demonstrating a procedure. Animations are suitable for subject matter that is dynamic, complex, and unfamiliar (Lowe et al., 2021) — such as showing velocity or acceleration (Ploetzner et al., 2020). Velocity and acceleration, which can be tough to describe in words, can be animated as how quickly an object is moving and in which direction.