Animation-Based Lectures in Renal Physiology: Transcendence into Metacognition

Renal physiology has often been the most difficult topic for students to grasp and provides pedagogical challenge to educators. It has an inherent difficulty associated with it (intrinsic cognitive load). This inherent difficulty may not be altered by an instructor by didactic lecture or by static slides without animation (extraneous cognitive load) and it then becomes difficult for the student to understand core concepts in renal physiology like renal regulation of acid-base balance through ion exchange (eSlide). The first example is that of typical conventional diagram provided in almost all physiology text books. To learn from these diagrams learners must split their attention between various arrows to understand and grasp ion exchange. This is a typical example of Split-attention effect (extraneous cognitive load) and eludes elucidation as it has to be decoded mentally to which many learners may not be adept at and also our working memory capacity is limited. The later slides depicting “Integrated example” enhances learning because embellished with animations and displayed sequentially, it guides the learner’s attention through the worked example. The linguistic invention-animation-based lectures (ABL) as a protologism was first used by us in 2009. Majority of the students agreed that ABL helped to sustain interest, visualize concepts better, remembering facts, applying knowledge and understanding better different aspects of physiology teaching (including renal physiology)