Format effects in the understanding of motion from kinematic diagrams in engineering education

Understanding and constructing domain-specific external representations, such as kinematic diagrams, is an important goal of engineering education. International standards (ISO 3952-1) prescribe their format in terms of graphical elements in black and white and two dimensions. However, during training, the canonical format is often modified under the assumption that it facilitates learning and comprehension of motion. The question arises as to whether understanding movement from kinematic diagrams shows format effects (Colour code and Projection), i.e. facilitation of colour and 3D projection, at different levels of engineering education. In the present study, we investigated understanding of movement from kinematic diagrams used as static graphical representations of a mechanism. 132 graduate and undergraduate students of French engineering schools took part in the experiment. According to the expectations of the multimedia model, we found a main effect of Projection and Colour code on understanding movement from kinematic diagrams. Higher understanding was found for polychrome diagrams using three-dimensional projection. Furthermore, an interaction between Colour code and Level of study indicated fading of format effect regarding colour with recent training and practice. Following this finding, the role of level of study and recentness of using rule-based graphical representations are discussed. The study showed the importance of format and student characteristics for understanding graphical representations in engineering education.