Ancient Chinese poetry was characterized by its rhyme scheme and highly visual nature. Xie and colleagues employed a within-subjects design to investigate the impact of drawing strategies on poetry learning. Sixty Tang poetic lines (e.g., 「犬吠水聲中，桃花帶露濃。」”The dogs’ barking is looming in the gurgling water; the peach blossoms are prosperous with crystal dew.”) were chosen as learned or tested items, with similar difficulty, familiarity, and concreteness. These items could be drawn, read, or written, and each participant learned the same number of items under each strategy.
Experiment 1 involved 59 college students recruited in China. In the learning phase, each participant was required to learn 30 poetic lines and each line was learnt by one of three learning conditions: (1) “draw” – draw a pictorial representation; (2) “read” – read aloud repeatedly; (3) “write” – transcribe verbatim. Learning performance was assessed through item recognition (distinguishing old from new items) and source memory (recalling the learning strategy) tests. Self-reported questionnaires assessed motivation for learning poems. Results showed that:
- Drawing yielded the highest item recognition and source memory accuracy, followed by reading, then writing.
- Students were more motivated to use drawing than reading or writing to learn.
Experiment 2, which involved 89 college students, compared drawing with an “explain” strategy, where participants paraphrased poems. A delayed test was included after one week. Results demonstrated that:
- Initially, drawn items had lower recognition and source memory accuracy than explained ones.
- However, in the delayed test, no accuracy differences were observed, indicating drawing’s superiority for retention.
- Motivation remained higher for drawing compared to explaining.
The findings suggest that drawing is an effective strategy for learning poetry and the authors recommend that future research explore its effects on higher-order cognitive skills, as this study focused on foundational knowledge and skills.
Source: Xie, H., Lin, D., He, W., & Chen, Q. (2024). The aesthetics at a pencil tip: The effects of drawing on learning poems. Learning and Instruction, 91, 101881. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2024.101881