The goal of the proposed research is to advance knowledge of how to apply cognitive principles about the understanding of temporally structured concepts to the design of animated STEM instructional materials. The focus of this research will be on STEM concepts that involve processes and transformations that unfold over time, such as photosynthesis and earthquakes. Relatively little is known about how students learn STEM concepts that involve a sequence of steps or phases compared to how they learn more static concepts, such as kinds of rocks. Analyses show that the current use of animations in practice to teach such concepts does not consistently improve learning. In this project, the research team will build on recent substantial advances in cognitive science about how people understand and remember everyday events and attempt to apply these cutting-edge findings to further the understanding of how people learn about processes and transformations in complex STEM concepts. They will test a theory-driven intervention using real-world STEM instructional material. Should this work be successful, it will help to explain why some STEM instructional animations aid student learning, and why the majority of such animations currently used in educational practice do not. Moreover, the output of this project will provide principles that will eventually guide how such animations should be designed in the future to facilitate STEM learning. In this project, a transdisciplinary team wi