Addressing visual fatigue for student engagement: Needs analysis and animation-based muhadatsah design in boarding schools

Visual fatigue in learning environments is commonly associated with monotonous, text-heavy printed materials that provide limited visual stimulation. This study aims to identify students’ visual learning needs and develop a contextual, modeling-based animated video prototype as an instructional intervention. Employing a Research and Development (R&D) approach based on the ADDIE model, the study was limited to the Analysis and Design phases and involved 28 seventh-grade students and one Arabic language teacher at Al-Hamra Islamic Boarding School Junior High School. Data were collected through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and expert validation. The findings indicate that: (1) students demonstrated behavioral resistance toward conventional textbooks, evidenced by physical damage to approximately 70% of the books, largely due to their text-heavy design; (2) the proposed prototype features animated characters representing Islamic boarding school students (santri) and dormitory-based settings to enhance emotional relevance and contextual authenticity; and (3) expert validation produced high feasibility scores from the subject-matter expert (93.3%), media expert (91.4%), and language expert (91.7%), with an overall average of 92.1%, categorized as “Highly Feasible.” The study concludes that the contextual animated video prototype has strong theoretical validity as a potential solution for mitigating students’ visual fatigue before production. Future research should continue through the Development, Implementation, and Evaluation phases and experimentally examine its effectiveness in improving students’ speaking proficiency.