Deriving instructional design principles from multimedia presentations with animations

The purpose of this paper is to propose a set of instructional design principles as derived from a review of recent empirical studies on multimedia learning with animations. In all studies, students viewed a computer generated animation depicting the process of lightning formation. Different elements from the interface were varied in order to analyze the effect that such variation had on students´ performance. To assess students´ understanding of the material, they were asked to write explanations of how lightning forms (retention test), to give names for parts of an illustration (matching test), and to apply what they have learned to solve new problems (transfer test). Based on the results of each study, a different design principle is proposed