- Title: Watching videos of a drawing hand improves students’ understanding of the normal probability distribution
- Authors: Icy (Yunyi) Zhang, Xiaohan Hanna Guo, Ji Y. Son, Idan A. Blank & James W. Stigler
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Paper summary
This research explores how watching videos of a hand drawing diagrams improves students’ understanding of normal probability distributions. Three studies investigated student misconceptions about normal distributions, then experimentally compared the effectiveness of instructional videos using static slides, dynamic drawings (with and without a visible hand), and dynamic slides with a moving cursor. Results showed that videos featuring a hand drawing led to better immediate learning than other methods, possibly due to enhanced attentional guidance. However, dynamic slides with a moving cursor yielded similar long-term learning gains, suggesting that attentional direction may be key. The study highlights the benefits of dynamic visualizations in statistics education and offers implications for instructional design.
What are the key implications for teachers in the classroom?
The results of these three studies suggest some key implications for statistics instructors:
- Instructors should consider using whiteboards or chalkboards to dynamically draw visualizations, rather than relying only on clean, professional-looking, computer-generated visualizations. While commonly used in statistics courses, the latter may not be as beneficial for student learning.
- Instructors who create instructional videos might want to go beyond screen-captured drawings and include visible hands. This could be a worthwhile effort to enhance student learning.
- Dynamically drawing data distributions with a hand may be more effective in directing student attention over time to different components of the data visualization, giving them more time to process and integrate those components.
- Instructors who use computer-generated visualizations might want to consider revealing them in a step-by-step manner that mimics continuous drawing. This approach could potentially be as effective as hand-drawn visualizations.
- Instructors might want to experiment with using a moving cursor and highlighting to direct learners’ attention to specific parts of visualizations. This could enhance the effectiveness of static slides and potentially provide similar benefits to those of hand-drawn visualizations.
It is important for instructors to consider the trade-offs between ease of implementation and student improvement when deciding on the best visualization techniques to use in the classroom. Dynamic and embodied visualizations, such as hand-drawn visualizations, may be more effective for learning but also more challenging to implement. Future research could help to further clarify the ideal trade-offs in this regard.
Quote
Dynamic drawing with a visible hand produced better learning outcomes than both static slides and dynamic drawing without a visible hand, but not significantly different from dynamic slides (i.e., a cursor moving around otherwise static slides)
