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Want students to remember something? Ask them to draw it.
edutopia:
3.14.2019 by Youki Terada
It’s
long been known that drawing something helps a person remember it. A new study shows
that drawing is superior to activities such as reading or writing because it
forces the person to process information in multiple ways: visually,
kinesthetically, and semantically. Across a series of experiments, researchers
found drawing information to be a powerful way to boost memory, increasing
recall by nearly double.
Myra
Fernandes, Jeffrey Wammes, and Melissa Meade are experts in the science of
memory—how people encode, retain, and recall information. At the University of
Waterloo, they conducted experiments to better understand how activities such
as writing, looking at pictures, listening to lectures, drawing, and
visualizing images affect a student’s ability to remember information.
In
an early experiment, they asked undergraduate students to study lists of common
terms—words like truck and pear—and then either write down or
illustrate those words. Shortly afterward, participants recalled 20 percent of
words they had written down, but more than twice as many—45 percent—of the
terms they had drawn. This experiment helped to establish the benefits of
drawing.
In
a follow-up experiment, the researchers compared two methods of
note-taking—writing words by hand versus drawing concepts—and found drawing to
be “an effective and reliable encoding strategy, far superior to writing.” The
researchers found that when the undergraduates visually represented science
concepts like isotope and spore, their recall was nearly twice
as good as when they wrote down definitions supplied by the lecturer.
Importantly,
the benefits of drawing were not dependent on the students’ level of artistic
talent, suggesting that this strategy may work for all students, not just ones
who are able to draw well.
IN
THE CLASSROOM
There
are several ways that teachers can incorporate drawing to enrich learning.
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