The statements presented on this page come from approximately 40 academic research in peer-reviewed journals published 1970-2023.

Visual Learning

• Presenting ideas visually is an effective entry point to complex ideas.
• Visual summaries can be used to effectively supplement more traditional, linear verbal cues, like lectures and PowerPoint presentations.
• 69.6% said that visual diagrams gave them a broader perspective of the coursework and that they learned new ways of ordering facts and information.
• The most effective summary is one that coordinates a verbal and visual summary of the explanation, rather than one that summarizes the explanation only in words or only in pictures.

Note-taking Instruction

• There is a need for explicit instruction in note-taking strategies.
• When students learn how to incorporate note-taking skills and write down important ideas, they also improve their understanding of what they have read.
• While teaching a specific course, teachers should also teach the necessary note-taking strategies to their students.
• Direct instruction in note-taking helps students learn from text books.

Note-taking Methods

• If important information is contained in notes, it has a 34% chance of being remembered.
• Handwriting increases brain activity, hones fine motor skills, and can predict a child’s academic success in ways that keyboarding can’t.
• Handwriting has a low cognitive load, which means people can think, listen, and talk while they take notes.
• Longhand note-taking may enhance learners’ encoding and retention of the material by sustaining their attention to the lectures.
• Participants had significantly better free recall of words written in the handwriting condition.
• Even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing.
• Taking and reviewing photos of lecture content was just as ineffective as not taking any notes at all.

Drawing

• Drawing is a fruitful path for applications in everyday life and in educational settings.
• Experiments indicate that drawing enhances memory.
• Sketching can have a beneficial effect on learning above and beyond generating written explanations.
• Gains are greater from drawing than other known mnemonic techniques, such as semantic elaboration, visualization, writing, and even tracing to-be-remembered information.
• New meanings are created and noticed when learners engage in representational practices, such as drawing.
• The drawing and multimedia conditions outperformed the summary and text-only conditions, thereby supporting the role of visualization, whereas the drawing and observation conditions outperformed the imagery conditions.
• As tangible artifacts visual representations constitute material entities with which to interact and thereby develop knowledge.
• Images other than photographs can serve as evocative and potent visuals to support memory and reflection.
• Sketching is a design practice that can also help student learn science concepts through the generation of mental models of conceptual understanding.
• Generating drawings prior to studying provided visuals is worth the time and effort.
• Students who were instructed to generate drawings during learning scored higher than students who only read on subsequent tests of transfer.
• Learners who created drawings exhibited higher comprehension test performance than learners who wrote verbal summaries.
• Using drawing for learning and thinking is not about being “good at art” but about using graphics to support ideas.

Reviewing and Sharing

• Every time you review material you both retain much more information, and your forgetting curve steadies out at a much higher level.
• The interactive draw-and-tell group recalled more correct information for items compared to the other three recall groups.
• Regularly reviewing classroom work is vital if students are to understand, retain, and apply information.