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.Īcross a total of eight experiments, the researchers confirmed drawing to be a "reliable, replicable means of boosting performance"-it provided a significant boost to students' ability to remember what they were learning. 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. This experiment helped to establish the benefits of drawing. 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. 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. 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.
Myra Fernandes, Jeffrey Wammes, and Melissa Meade are experts in the science of memory-how people encode, retain, and recall information. Importantly, the simplicity of this strategy means it can be used by people with cognitive impairments to enhance memory, with preliminary findings suggesting measurable gains in performance in both normally aging individuals and patients with dementia. We propose that drawing improves memory by promoting the integration of elaborative, pictorial, and motor codes, facilitating creation of a context-rich representation. In delineating the mechanism of action, we have shown that gains are greater from drawing than other known mnemonic techniques, such as semantic elaboration, visualization, writing, and even tracing to-be-remembered information. Specifically, we have shown this technique can be applied to enhance learning of individual words and pictures as well as textbook definitions. In our recent research, we explored whether drawing to-be-learned information enhanced memory and found it to be a reliable, replicable means of boosting performance. The colloquialism “a picture is worth a thousand words” has reverberated through the decades, yet there is very little basic cognitive research assessing the merit of drawing as a mnemonic strategy. In this model, the beneficial effects of drawing, over and above basic verbal memory (“v”), are driven by the integrated contributions of elaborative, motoric, and pictorial information.
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