Creating drawings enhances learning by teaching.

Abstract

This study tested whether creating drawings helps students generate higher-quality oral explanations during learning by teaching, thereby enhancing learning outcomes. 120 college students studied a scientific text about the human respiratory system. Students then either taught the material on video to a fictitious peer by orally explaining (explain-only), creating drawings (draw-only), or creating drawings while orally explaining (explain-and-draw). A control group of students spent the same amount of time restudying the lesson (restudy). One week later all students completed a posttest consisting of retention, transfer, and drawing questions. All three teaching conditions significantly outperformed the restudy condition on the posttest (d′s ranging from .80 to 1.46). Critically, the explain-and-draw group also significantly outperformed the explain-only (d = .99) and the draw-only (d = .65) groups. Consistent with our primary hypotheses, the explain-and-draw group produced more elaborative oral explanations than the explain-only group, which partially explained the benefits of drawing while explaining on learning outcomes. Overall, this study demonstrates that drawing facilitates explaining and enhances the effectiveness of learning by teaching.

Unterricht in Zeiten von Corona: Ein Blick auf die Herausforderungen aus der Sicht von Unterrichts- und Instruktionsforschung

“…Um eine hohe Lernwirksamkeit zu erreichen, empfiehlt es sich, die generativen Aktivitäten vor dem Hintergrund der zu erreichenden Lernziele zu gestalten. Dabei können generative Aktivitäten miteinander kombiniert werden (Fiorella und Kuhlmann 2020 ). Schülerinnen und Schüler können generative Aktivitäten auch mit Hilfe digitaler Werkzeuge umsetzen (z.…”

Five Strategies for Optimizing Instructional Materials: Instructor- and Learner-Managed Cognitive Load

“…1c . For example, research on learning by drawing suggests that students understand science texts better when they create drawings compared to when they only read the text or if they use text-focused learner strategies like summarizing (Fiorella & Kuhlmann, 2020 ; Fiorella & Zhang, 2018 ). In a study by Leopold and Leutner ( 2012 ), students either created drawings or generated verbal summaries while learning from a scientific text about structure of water molecules.…”

Learning by Drawing Visual Representations: Potential, Purposes, and Practical Implications

“…Visual representations can also be simple illustrations that young children add to stories to enhance a story they are telling together (Gelmini-Hornsby et al, 2011). By externalizing one’s understanding in a visual representation, not only is a peer’s understanding improved, but also the process of coordinating a drawing with a verbal explanation enhances the creator’s comprehension as well (Fiorella & Kuhlmann, 2020).…”