Animations need narrations: An experimental test of a dual-coding hypothesis.

In 2 experiments, mechanically naive college students viewed an animation depicting the operation of a bicycle tire pump that included a verbal description given before (words-before-pictures) or during (words-with-pictures) the animation. The words-with-pictures group outper-formed the words-before-pictures group on tests of creative problem solving that involved reasoning about how the pump works. In a follow-up experiment, students in the words-with-pictures group performed better on the problem-solving test than students who saw the animation without words (pictures only), heard the words without the animation (words only), or received no training (control). Results support a dual-coding hypothesis (Paivio, 1990) that posits two kinds of connections: representational connections between verbal stimuli and verbal represen-tations and between visual stimuli and visual representations and referential connections between visual and verbal representations. A major goal of science is to provide explanations for how various physical, biological, and social systems work. It fol-lows that a major goal of science education is to help students understand scientific explanations. What constitutes an un-