What question did this study set out to answer?

To investigate whether creating drawings enhances students' oral explanations and improves learning outcomes during learning by teaching.

August 15, 2019Open Access

Creating drawings enhances learning by teaching.

Key Points

To investigate whether creating drawings enhances students' oral explanations and improves learning outcomes during learning by teaching.
120 college students studied a scientific text about the human respiratory system.
Participants were divided into four groups: explain-only, draw-only, explain-and-draw, and a control restudy group.
A posttest was conducted one week later to assess retention, transfer, and drawing questions.
All three teaching conditions (draw-only, explain-only, explain-and-draw) significantly outperformed the restudy condition on the posttest (d′s ranging from .80 to 1.46).
The explain-and-draw group outperformed both the explain-only (d = .99) and draw-only (d = .65) groups on oral explanations.
The explain-and-draw strategy resulted in more elaborative oral explanations, contributing to better learning outcomes.

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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Creating drawings enhances learning by teaching.

Key Points

Abstract

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