Drawing to learn: a conceptual framework to guide research and teaching

A Picture Shows A Thousand Ideas
Kim Quillin from Salisbury University walked us through three basic questions that relate to drawing: what is drawing, why do we draw and how do we make our drawings better. To answer the what question, Quillin noted that drawing requires selection, organization and integration of ideas. It is interesting to think about how students draw pictures and how they perceive the pictures that are drawn by their instructors. Typically, if asked to draw a wolf, students will draw the tangible wolf resembling the wild animal that looks like man's best friend. Sometimes though, the tangible picture is not appropriate and a wolf should be represented in an abstract way. An example of this might be if a student is diagramming a food chain or food web. In these cases, a wolf may be represented as the letters W-O-L-F boxed in with arrows extending away from the box. The why question can be explained by the following 2x2 box:

	representational	abstract
formative
summative

Drawings that are formative and representational engage, enhance and improve thinking. Those that are representational and summative record and communicate thinking, while drawings that are abstract and summative reveal, communicate and facilitate thinking. Quillin values drawings that are abstract and formative because they engage, foster, reveal, promote and improve thinking. Further she says that these are the types of drawings in textbooks, so they represent the highest value category of intellectual drawing.
The how question is impacted by three factors: affect (attitude, value, self efficacy, interest), visual literacy (visual language, practice with translation, practice with medium), and model-based reasoning (drawing, using. evaluating and revising a model).

Drawing Is A Science Process Skill
Novice students appear to assume that pictures are precise, exact and what experts do to explain ideas, while experts seem to merely use drawings to represent an idea in an explainable way to facilitate a discussion. To help students approach drawing/communicating like a scientist requires similar practice to helping students think like a scientist - in-class practice and determining measurable weaknesses that can be improved. This idea of drawing as an important skill for communication is a subject of science education research as a blooms taxonomy has even been developed for drawing.