By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel

We have looked at the benefits of combining text and visuals for memory and learning – see dual coding – in many previous posts. A new series of experiments has investigated the effects of drawing specifically and whether drawing improves memory for the to-be-learned material compared to other strategies (1). The research is so new that it is currently only available as a preprint and in the process of being submitted for publication. The upside of this is that the paper is already available publicly and that you can provide the authors with feedback on it. The researchers wanted to test whether drawing increases memory performance more than writing or mental imagery. In three experiments they pitched different conditions against each other to explore this topic.

Drawing vs. Writing vs. Doodling: Single Words Recall

In the first experiment, participants studied a list of words. Each word was presented individually to the participant followed by one of three prompts: drawing out the word, writing out the word repeatedly, doodling something unrelated. In the final memory test, the words that were drawn were remembered better than the words in the other conditions. So, a clear benefit of drawing the words was found.

Drawing vs. Writing: Word Pairs

In the second experiment, participants studied a list of unrelated word pairs. This time each word pair presentation was followed by one of two prompts: drawing a picture illustrating both words of the pair versus writing out the word pair out a couple of times. Memory performance on the final test showed a benefit of the drawing strategy compared to the writing strategy.

Drawing vs. Mental Imagery: Word Pairs

In the final experiment, participants studied a list of unrelated word pairs. However, now participants were allocated to either a drawing condition where they had to draw the word pairs, or they were allocated to a mental imagery condition and asked to create a mental image of the word pairs. In addition, participants were prompted after each word pair to do one of two things: drawing/imagining the words together (unitized) versus drawing/imagining the words separately (non-unitized). Here is an example from the paper for the unitize prompt: “if asked to combine two unrelated words such as BUS and LIBRARIAN, they could generate an image of a bus driven by and used by librarians, a book about buses, or a librarian wearing a t-shirt of a bus.” In the final memory test, participants recalled more words when they were asked to imagine/draw the words together, i.e., the unitized condition. Just looking at the difference between drawing and mental imagery, there was not a benefit on memory recall for either, i.e., both conditions performed equally well. However, when you further break down the results and look at the four different groups (drawing/unitized, drawing/non-unitized, imagining/unitized, imagining/non-unitized), the findings look like this: The drawing strategy outperformed the imagining strategy when participants were explicitly asked to draw/imagine the words interacting with each other (unitized). In the condition where participants had to draw/imagine the words separately both groups performed equally well (non-unitized). So, it seems to be that the instruction on how to create a drawing can make a difference. Encouraging interactive drawings through simple instructions can enhance memory for the information. This experiment comes with a small caveat: Participants reported that they felt they had not enough time to complete their drawings when asked to draw the two words separately. This is something for the researchers to further investigate in the future, but it does not take away from the benefits of integrating unrelated words within one drawing.

 Take Aways!

• The series of experiments showed benefits of drawing compared to writing as a way to study information which aligns with the dual coding strategy.

• Instructions to generate connected drawings can further boost performance.

• There is always room for improvement, so here are a couple of thoughts:

  • For classroom implementation we are interested in long-term benefits of a strategy. The experiments presented here all used a very short delay between end of studying and the final test (a couple of minutes). It would be interesting to look at this effect for longer delays.

  • The materials used in the experiments are less relevant to the classroom, but in research it is important to start with simpler materials and work your way up to more complex and authentic materials.

  • It would be interesting to look at different writing instructions that would engage more elaborative processes in the learner than repeatedly writing out words. What happens if you pitch a drawing strategy against an elaborative writing strategy?

The presented paper comes with interesting findings that stimulates further research avenues. It’s definitely a topic that has practical implications by featuring strategies that are easy to implement and probably validate current classroom practices.

(cover image by Miguel Á. Padriñán on Pexels)

Reference

(1) Murray, J., Ridgillova, N., Djurhuus, J. R., Feketova, L., Danielsson, J. I. M., & Fathima, A. (2024, January 16). The Effects of Drawing on Episodic Item & Associative Recall. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/54kg6