Learning by drawing

by MulaiAzhagi Sun Jul 15, 2012 11:32 pm

The project, called “Picturing to Learn,” is the brainchild of Felice Frankel, a scientific photographer and Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University. In 2005, Frankel received a grant from the National Science Foundation to try her idea in a few science classes, including “Introduction to Solid State Chemistry” at MIT and “Invisible Worlds: Micro- and Nanothings” at Harvard.
Students were asked to explain various concepts by drawing pictures that a high school student could understand. You can see several of those drawings on the program’s Web site. More drawings accompany this press release from MIT.
Kara Culligan, a student in George Whitesides’ micro-nano class at Harvard, says drawing gave her a chance to be more creative, and was a nice break after all the calculations. “I’m definitely a very visual learner,” she says. “You have to understand it fully before you can draw it.”
One assignment asked her to describe the behavior of a “particle in a box,” an abstract concept in quantum mechanics in which a particle is constrained to remain inside a defined region of space. “I visualized a little particle bouncing around in a box,” Culligan says. This gave her the idea to depict the concept as a pinball game where sections of the game represent the different energy levels the particle can have. In another drawing, Culligan represented Brownian motion as bumper cars colliding.
Sadoway has employed “Picturing to Learn” in his last three freshman chemistry classes. He says he uses it to teach certain difficult concepts, such as understanding the relationship between chemical-bond strength and boiling point. When students try to explain this in words, Sadoway says, he can’t be sure they really understand the concept: “Sometimes the right terms are there, but the explanation may be muddy.” When he asks for a calculation, “They’ll give me answers to three significant figures in no time, but they may not understand the relevant science.” But when students have to draw a picture of how it works, “I can see whether the student understood the topic right off the bat.”
Because the drawings show students’ misconceptions so clearly, Sadoway says, he can now anticipate which concepts are likely to confuse learners. “It’s changed the way I teach,” he says, adding that students seem to do better in these topics on the final exam.

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2008/05/21/learning-by-drawing/