THE EFFECT OF USING E-LEARNING TOOLS BASED ON VISUALIZATION IN TEACHING AND LEARNING LATIN O EFEITO DE UTILIZAR FERRAMENTAS DE E-LEARNING BASEADAS NA VISUALIZAÇÃO NO ENSINO E APRENDIZAGEM DE LATIM

Ph.D. in Pedagogy from the Institute of Information Technologies and Learning Tools of National Academy of Educational Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv/Ukraine). Associate Professor on Department of Journalism and Linguistic Communication of National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv/Ukraine). THE EFFECT OF USING E-LEARNING TOOLS BASED ON VISUALIZATION IN TEACHING AND LEARNING LATIN


THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
In this research, we understand visualization in the broad sense as "presentation of pictures showing easy to recognize objects that are connected through well-defined relations. It means the translation of mental, abstract, formal concepts into images by looking and seeing objects and processes" (URSYN, 2018, p.1).
Visualization is interpreted as an indicator of simplicity and clarity for the subject of a mental image created in the process of perception and subsequent mental processing of real objects; a tool based on visualization is considered as an external support of internal actions carried out in the learning process.
According to Gooding (2004, p.2), visual modes of representation are essential to the generation, communication, and dissemination of new knowledge. Popkov and Korzhuev (2010), exploring the scientific basis of visualization principle in universities, emphasize the need to include the activities related to modeling, idealization, imaginary experimentation into the learning process. Scholars point out that the teacher has visual tools at his disposal that would provide an opportunity to show and find the very essential links and relations between the objects and phenomena under study and the values that describe them (not their individual minor manifestations), and the degree of influence of various factors and conditions on the natural phenomenon under study. Shah and Freedman (2003) consider that the benefits of using visualization in learning environments are: promoting learning by providing an external representation of the information, deeper processing of information; maintaining learner attention by making the information more attractive and motivating. Shatri & Buza (2017) proved, that the use of visualization in the teaching and learning process has a positive influence in increasing and developing the critical thinking of students. Sankey, Birch and Gardiner (2010, p.853) noted that: the increasing use of multimedia in teaching has provided many opportunities to present multiple representations of content (text, video, audio, images, interactive elements) to cater more effectively to the different learning styles and modal preferences of an increasingly diverse student body.
If traditional learning visual aids required the specifics of the object under study, then computer technologies use allows the dynamic interpretation of essential properties not only of real objects, but also scientific laws, theories, concepts. According to research (VOLOSHINOV, 2011), such multimedia visualization allows creating a more progressive nature-like environment to display educational content, its visual interactive modeling and research; hypermedia architecture provides a person-focused, developing nature of education. The extraordinary expressiveness and visual appeal of multimedia are important in dealing with a new video-generation which easily absorbs knowledge through the works of computer culture. It forms students' tendency to perceive, to know the world through figurative and visual information presentation based on ICT, the readiness to work in the information society. Multimedia visualization is characterized by much greater informational density, the merge of conceptual and visual that organically embraces both verbal and creative thinking.
Also, e-tools provide the subjects of learning with the opportunity to perform transforming activity with the objects of learning, to observe and analyze its results, thus achieving a significant improvement of gnosticism models of objects under study. Thus, the principle of visual aids using in the studies of modern didacticians is interpreted not only with the availability of the object under study to perceive via observation but is supplemented by the requirements to attract the subject of learning to transform activity, accompanied by the visualization of its results (LAPINSKY, 2009;MADZIHON et al., 2003). Henderson (1999, p.237) to help explain why visual representations are so powerful, develops the concept of "metaindexicality" -the ability of visual representation, used interactively, to combine many diverse levels of knowledge and thus to serve as a meeting ground (and sometimes battleground) for many types of workers.
Other researchers believe that the damage from using multimedia tools in education is more apparent than the benefit. According to Afanasjev (2006), any use of visual aids in education is harmful when they replace students' independent imagination and thinking. The overuse of visual aids can cultivate "comics-thinking". In general, visual aids often initiate not the intellect but emotions, and therefore, they are convenient means of imposing opinions from the outside, while the education goal is to teach students to do it on their own. Useful visual aids should not replace, but rather initiate both imagination and human intelligence, expand and enrich the current experience. The researcher brings up an issue of whether modern ICT can involve a person into experience, which is hard to get, and in this way to make the person more developed, to expand the scope of independent thinking. And although many scholars (FAHIM and VAEZI, 2011;HASHEMI and POURGHARIB, 2013;KOLODII et al., 2017;HSIAO et al., 2017;SADEGHI and FARZIZADEH, 2013) have studied the use of visualization in foreign language teaching and learning, most of these studies dealt with living foreign languages.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The purpose of the experimental research work was to carry out the system of pedagogical impact by means of e-learning tools based on visualization and evaluate the effect of using such tools on teaching and learning Latin by veterinary students.
The following criteria have been established for the effectiveness of learning: • motivation (indicators: focus and level of academic motivation), • cognition (indicators: quality and amount of knowledge academic performance), • activity (indicators: mastering practical skills, speed of execution of training tasks).
This study aims to answer the following research questions: Therefore, the main research hypothesis was: H 0 : The use of e-learning tools based on visualization has no effect on teaching and learning Latin by veterinary students.
It was specified in the following working hypotheses:

PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING
The experiment lasted 4 years (from 2016 to 2019) and consisted of three stages. At the first stage, we examined the status and trends in teaching with using e-learning tools in agrarian universities, diagnosed students' needs on the use of e-learning tools and defined experimental and control groups.
A total 247 veterinary students (109 male and 138 female) from Ukrainian agrarian universities participated in the experiment. 6 teachers (2 senior lecturers and 4 associate professors) were involved in experimental work. Defining the research problem, methodology, experimental design, developing instruments, data collection and analysis were carried out by the author in the framework of Ph.D. thesis (BALALAIEVA, 2016).
At the beginning of the experiment, there were not any considerable differences between levels of indicators among students of the control and experimental groups, because they did not have a background and prior knowledge in the Latin (this language is not studied in schools in Ukraine), that made it possible to ensure the homogeneity of the group composition.
At the second stage, under the experimental conditions, students of the control group (n=124) were trained in traditional ways; students of the experimental group (n=123) were trained with a new technique, providing for the complex use of traditional learning tools, some online resources and software as well as special e-textbook «Elementa Linguae Latinae», based on visualization. Online resources and software were selected by such criteria as accuracy, credibility, reasonableness, support, interactivity, aesthetics, accessibility, communicative, pragmatic and cognitive value (BALALAIEVA, 2019).
The e-textbook "Elementa Linguae Latinae" was designed taking into account major principles of teaching Latin at the Faculty of Veterinarian Medicine, objective factors (students' provision of learning materials, academic performance and motivation, normatively defined goals with defined priorities in developing competencies) and subjective factors (student preferences). Its purpose, tasks, macro-and microstructure, interface are described in detail in the previous author's articles (BALALAIEVA, 2016;

2017),
One of an important feature of this e-textbook is the consistent use of cognitive visualization tools in the delivery of the training material, such as cognitive-graphic models, schemes, etc. (see figure 1).

Figure 1 -Example of task on Latin based on the visualization
The use of cognitive visualization techniques is relevant specifically for electronic guides designed to help master the discipline and provide solutions to local pedagogical problems: supplementing the material of the basic textbook, repeating and systematizing the acquired knowledge, providing additional or reference information on a specific topic, etc.
At the third stage, quantitative and qualitative analysis of empirical data were carried out, results of the research were systematized and generalized.

DATA COLLECTION
The Also, students of experimental and control groups were evaluated through a system of standardized achievement tests in the Latin language. Based on the results of the three tests (by different modules), the student average scores were calculated, which formed the basis of two independent samples (total sample size -247). To test the hypothesis about the coincidence of the characteristics of the two groups, in particular, to determine whether there is a significant difference between the values of indicators of academic progress of students in control and experimental groups, as these differences are reliable and whether they could be extrapolated to the whole population t-test was applied.
To evaluate the learning effectiveness, the methodology of Bespalko (1999) for determining the coefficient of mastering the educational material (K a ) with standard values for 3 levels: low (K a < 0.7), medium (0.7 ≤ K a < 0.85), high (0,85 ≤ K a ≤ 1) was used. The measurement of the speed of execution of training tasks was carried out according to the actual time required for a student to complete one test.
To determine the levels of test execution speed (V t ) following limits were accepted: low (V t ≥ 80 min), medium (60 min < V t < 80 min), high V t < 60 min. Data reliability was checked by using statistical analysis with Pearson's chi-squared test.

RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
Comparative analysis of the dynamics of educational motivation showed that the difference in the growth of the number of students with dominating intrinsic motives is 10.4% for the experimental group.
It is proved that positive changes have occurred in the redistribution of motivation levels: in experimental group number of students with a low level of motivation decreased by 1.4%, with a high level of motivation increased by 9.4%; in control one the number of students with a low level of motivation decreased by 0.4%, with high level increased by 0.8% (figure 2).

Figure 2 -Comparative diagram of the distribution of intrinsic motivation levels in the control and experimental groups at the beginning and end of the experiment
To test the hypothesis about the coincidence of the characteristics of the two groups, in particular, to determine whether there is a significant difference between the significant values of indicators of academic progress of students in control and experimental groups, as these differences are reliable and whether they could be extrapolated to the whole generation was applied t-test (Appendix B). The positive difference in learning was ascertained in the experimental group: the number of students with medium and high levels of academic progress increased. In particular, the number of students with low progress in the experimental group is 14.2% less than in the control one, but the number of students with medium and high levels of academic progress higher by 9.2% and 5% respectively (see figure 3).

Figure 3 -Comparative diagram of levels of academic progress in the control and experimental groups
In general, by the results of the statistical analysis, the average score in the experimental group is 0.51 higher than in the control one. Also it was determined that most of the students both in control and experimental groups demonstrated low speed of execution of training tasks; but in experimental group the number of students with medium speed of execution of training tasks is 9.2% greater than in control one, as well 6.4% of students showed a high speed of execution of training tasks (see figure 4). It was found that the overall speed of execution of training tasks in the experimental group is 7.8% higher than in the control one (reliability is confirmed by using statistical analysis with Pearson's chisquared test in Appendix C).
The results of the pedagogical experiment give the grounds to state that training veterinary students with using e-learning tools based on visualization is more effective than traditional one.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
Thus, the experiment has proved the positive statistically significant effect of using e-learning tools based on visualization on teaching and learning Latin by all criteria: motivation, cognition and activity.
The null hypothesis H 0 , stating that the use of e-learning tools based on visualization has no effect on teaching and learning Latin by veterinary students was rejected.
The results of this study are in line with the findings of a research performed by Zhou (2015), who conducted the experiment with 67 beginning Latin students, measuring objective emotional and cognitive engagement, learning, change in self-efficacy, cognitive load, accuracy in sentence translation and concluded, that students when using interactive visual tool reported considerably higher levels of engagement and learning, opted to perform more optional problems, and completed translation exercises with substantially greater accuracy than when using the traditional interface.
In particular, positive change dynamics have been discovered in learning motivation focus and in intrinsic motivation levels redistribution. These findings allow us to reject the hypothesis H 0 1: the use of e-learning tools based on visualization doesn't have any significant impact on the motivation of veterinary students in studying Latin. This result ties well with previous studies demonstrating a positive influence of visualization in students' motivation both in science education (SANKEY et al., 2010;EILKS et al., 2014;URSYN, 2016;SHATRI & BUZA, 2017) and foreign languages teaching and learning (HASHEMI & POURGHARIB, 2013;SADEGHI et al., 2013;HSIAO et al., 2017;KOLODII et al., 2017).
Concerning Latin, Zhou (2015) proved that visual tools can increase student emotional and cognitive engagement with grammar, Markus and Ross (2004) -with reading. In the same line, Zhou et al. (2016) showed that students reported a greater positive change in self-efficacy related to Latin grammar and reading comprehension after using tools based on visualization than after using the traditional text-only versions of the exercises. Self-efficacy, or task-related confidence, is an effective predictor of motivation (ZHOU et al., 2016, p.12) The results of the analysis by cognitive criterion allow us to reject the hypothesis H 0 2: the use of e-learning tools based on visualization doesn't have any significant impact on the cognition in studying Latin. This result is consistent with research by Zhou et al. (2016) showing that students reported reflecting more on the grammar of the sentences when using interactive visual tool than when solving the traditional text-only versions of the exercises. In the previous work Zhou (2015, p.60) showed that participants reported approximately equal levels of cognitive load in the experimental and control conditions.
Also, it was found that the overall speed of execution of training tasks and accuracy in terminological translation in the experimental group was higher than in the control one and this difference was statistically significant, that allows us to reject the hypothesis H 0 3: the use of e-learning tools based on visualization doesn't have any significant impact on the activity in studying Latin. A similar conclusion was reached by Zhou (2015, p. 3), stating that students, when using visual tool Ingenium, completed translation exercises with substantially greater accuracy than when using the traditional interface.
The effectiveness of e-learning tools using has been proved by a statistically significant increasing academic performance in experimental groups (in general, the average score in the experimental array is 0.51 higher than in the control one). So, hypothesis H 0 4, stating that there is no significant difference in academic performances on Latin of students trained in traditional ways and students trained with a technique, providing for the complex use of traditional and e-learning tools, based on visualization, was also rejected. These results are in accordance with findings reported by Zhou (2015), proving that students reported a higher level of learning Latin in the experimental conditions when using interactive visual tool.
But why the difference between the indicators of the control and experimental groups on cognition and activity criteria was significant but not as large as expected? There are many reasons for this.
In our opinion, the potential of modern e-learning tools not only allow the implementation of visualization principle on a whole new level but also significantly increase the didactic risks of its realization (BALALAIEVA, 2016).
Ageyev and Drevs (2003)  The objective shortcomings of computer learning tools (the need to have a computer with respective software and to be able to work on it; the difficulty to perceive large arrays of textual material from the screen; the lack of interactivity of computer learning tools) are often accompanied by subjective disadvantages caused by the conceptual errors in the design of certain e-learning tools.
The ergonomic requirements for e-learning tools determine the necessity to consider the age and the individual characteristics of users, different ways of thinking and nervous activity organization, and the patterns of intellectual and emotional rehabilitation. To reduce the load on visual analyzers while designing an e-learning tool it is necessary to consider physiological and ergonomic requirements for material visualization (colors, the spatial layout of information on the screen, the organization of alphanumeric characters, and symbols on the screen, image legibility and resolution, etc.).
Equally important is the danger which lies in pedagogically unjustified use of modern information technologies. According to Robert (2010), it is more common than sanitary rules violations.
The use of e-learning tools, developed with the violation of design-ergonomic and hygiene requirements, put the physical and mental health of users at risk.
The researchers note that attempts to interest via excessive use of animation and gaming tools do not achieve the desired goal primarily due to the "contrast effect" (AGEEV and DREVS, 2003, p. 120), when the student is familiar with dynamic computer games and simulators and expects the same dynamics from the e-learning tools.
The desire to make e-textbook bright and eye-catching out of ignorance of basic rules of font science, chromatics, composition, design leads to the opposite effect -it complicates the perception and understanding of information (sometimes to complete unreadableness). We also note that e-learning tools often use ready-made illustrative materials from different databases, resulting in that the manual includes various pictures, photos, video clips of questionable didactic potential; they are all different in technique, quality and purpose. Illustrative material should not contain extra information that distracts the students from absorbing the knowledge; the same-type illustration should be performed in the same technique.
Researchers (LAPINSKY, 2009) set out the requirements for software and computer systems of educational purpose that complement and extend the principle of visualization: • tools should contain such a visual model of the object that best contributes to the learning goal, without excessive details or simplifying the overall image plans; • a model should be presented in a form that allows most clearly identify and distinguish links and relationships components of an object; • cognition (stimulation of guessing) of educational material with visual aids should be implemented so as to enable the teacher to use the methods of active learning, and to make the learning process really interactive; • gnosticism of presenting educational models cannot be a goal in itself: it is necessary to use models of objects under study that do not present knowledge in a completed form but include research, the independent cognitive activity of students, encouraging their skills for such activities.
Scholars (MADZIHON et al., 2003) believe that modern understanding of visualization principle with using educational software creates significant didactic prerequisites for success in learning through emotional inclusion, gnosticism, the visualization of the information perception process, a dosage of multimodality of educational influences that encourage voluntary attention and use suggestive memory, individualization of educational information presentation pace. When creating and analyzing visual models, the subjects of learning have to undergo phases of scientific knowledge -to carry out system decomposition, the analysis of its components, the selection of essential features of objects and essential connections between them -with the subsequent determination of model's structure or the object and its synthesis.
Thus, the major advantages of e-learning tools for the implementation visualization principle are: the opportunity of abstract visual-figurative interpretation of essential properties of real objects, scientific laws, theories, concepts, providing a poly-sensorial perception of educational information, and the opportunity to carry out the transforming activity with objects or their models. However, the potentials of modern e-learning tools not only allow the implementation of the visualization principle on a whole new level but also significantly increase the didactic risk of its realization. To prevent such risks while designing the e-learning tools it is necessary to be guided by the requirement of reasonable visualization sufficiency -a necessary optimal minimum of illustrative material which has to be determined individually for each tool, depending on its purpose, functions in the learning process, target audience etc.
Despite all disadvantages and risks, we agree with modern researches (URSYN, 2018), that visual approach to learning is objective necessary today and fully share following opinion: notwithstanding individual differences in intelligence and learning style, this generation of children needs to be taught the way they learn best -with visual stimulation accompanied by active learning strategies. As educators, we need to prepare our students for the world in which they will live and work. We must allow this understanding of the visual nature of our students to influence our teaching techniques and the educational technologies we employ (GANGWER, 2015, p. 4).
In summary, the importance of this study is that it contributes to teaching and learning Latin in professional training by introducing the innovative research-based technique, providing for the complex use of traditional and e-learning tools, based on visualization.
The ways to minimize didactic risks that may result from inappropriate (from psychological and educational points of view) use of visual aids in e-learning tools are outlined.
The practical findings of this work were discussed and implemented into the educational process Although the research has reached its aims, there were some unavoidable limitations. First, the experiment was conducted only in Ukrainian agrarian universities.
To make a greater contribution to practical experience the result should be compared with similar studies in different countries, because our findings may not be applicable to other universities.
Second, the sample size was large enough for our local study, but it may be too small and nonrepresentative for the larger population. Also, the sample was too homogeneous (all participants were students of the same faculty of veterinary medicine) and may not be representative of students at other faculties.
Finally, the study was focused on Latin language teaching; this methodology is rather specific and has certain limitations in the formation of linguistic competencies in comparison with teaching live foreign languages that involve active communicative activity.