Drawing can provide a significant boost to memory when dealing with new ideas and concepts, as well as deliver benefits in how we process information. In one recent study, it was found that concepts that students had drawn were remembered twice as well as those students had simply written down. This was not dependent on their drawing skill either. Students who were not good at drawing still managed to gain a substantial benefit from doing it – even if the immediate results produced were not as pretty as those of their more talented peers.
Drawing is active, instead of passive. Students drawing an idea are engaging with it more directly than if they were simply writing down what someone else had told them about it. In order to draw something, they have to elaborate on its meaning to them – engaging rather than just repeating.
From a technical perspective, we could say that drawing involves invoking the visual memory of the image, the kinaesthetic memory of our hand drawing the image and the semantic memory that is invoked when we engage in meaning-making to create the picture itself.
The study, conducted at the University of Waterloo, concluded that drawing was “an effective and reliable encoding strategy, far superior to writing”.
CARS & STARS Online is a digital reading program designed to turn every student into a proficient and capable reader, with advanced levels of reading comprehension. The core reading strategies that underpin the entirety of the CARS & STARS Online digital reading comprehension program form an underlying instructional framework that recurs throughout every level and provides consistency of understanding and instruction for students and teachers alike.
CARS & STARS Online now includes a feature called Drawing Canvas that is available as standard with every Student and Child account. Here, students can begin to interact with the strategy through drawing. Students learn to use their imagination to engage with the passage and the strategy, and to think visually. The ability to start to engage with text and ideas like this form an important milestone on the way to developing higher-order thinking skills, and being able to engage with text and ideas in a more complex, abstract way.
If you are interested in learning more about the CARS & STARS Online subscriptions and how they can help children to achieve better results, then sign up for a free trial to be an integral part of your child’s reading success.
