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Doodles, Learning & Attention Span

January 4, 2013 by Tania Marien

The words “draw” and “art” can be scary words. I observe this repeatedly when I interact with the public. It is for this reason that I invite the public to doodle in my traveling guest sketchbook instead of draw in it.

How people make meaning has been an interest of mine for many years. How they make meaning through drawing is of particular interest.

In this weekly column about teaching and learning, we often look at examples that involve drawing activities specific to some aspect of botany education. Less often we look at how drawing, the more expressive kind, affects understanding. We’ll do a bit more of this today.

In Do Attention Span and Doodling Relate to Ability to Learn Content from an Educational Video?, Ashley Aellig, Sarah Cassady, Chelsea Francis and Deanna Toops, student researchers at Capital University, evaluate the effect doodling has on student learning.

Thirty-four self-selected students participated in the study. Students were given paper and pens to take notes and doodle before watching a 25-minute video about communication styles (Aellig et al., 2009). Students watched the video together, then completed a questionnaire that included an assessment tool designed to measure attention span. Upon completing the questionnaire, students handed their notes, doodles and questionnaires to Aellig et al. (2009).

The research team found that there was not a significant relationship between doodling score, attention span, and the number of correct responses to the quiz about the video. Their hypothesis — students with shorter attention spans would have more complex doodles and lower scores on the video quiz — was not supported (Aellig et al., 2009). Instead what they observed were students who did very little doodling, but plenty of note taking. Of the students participating in the study, only six doodled while most of them (n=24) took notes (Aellig et al., 2009).

Why didn’t the students doodle during the video? Aellig et al. (2009) propose a few possible reasons:

  • The sample population is too embedded in the texting generation and may be less-likely to doodle.
  • The video’s content was not challenging enough.
  • The self-selected sample population (students at Capital University) are already engaged in their learning in ways that do not involve doodling.

In the discussion section of their paper, Aellig et al. (2009) propose an idea for future research about doodling in the classroom. They propose creating a doodling culture by embedding doodlers among the population of student research subjects. Their thought is that this would demonstrate to the sample population “that doodling is acceptable” as a form of notetaking (Aellig et al., 2009).

I would like to propose another suggestion to future student researchers who address this topic.

What if doodling were not left to chance? What if subjects were assigned a specific doodling activity to complete during a task, as was conducted by Jackie Andrade in her research about doodling and efficiency?

Readers, what do you think?



Literature Cited

Aellig, Ashley, Sarah Cassady, Chelsea Francis, and Deanna Toops. 2009. Do attention span and doodling relate to ability to learn content from an education video? Epistimi. 4: 21-24. Web. <http://www.capital.edu/epistimi-2009> [accessed 3 January 2013]

Epistimi is a student research journal at Capital University in Ohio.

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Posted in Teaching & Learning | 4 Comments

4 Responses

  1. on January 4, 2013 at 12:04 PM Anne Pickering

    This is a very big subject. What makes you doodle at all ? what pressures or stresses increase it ? Is it about the subject under discussion ? Is it random drawing or is there some relationship to the discussed topic ?
    Does it increase question asking ? Can the doodler remember the content of the talk without notes, only doodles, Is the doodler bored by the subject being discussed ? Do they have very opposing views to the speaker ?
    What do doodlers do if they have no paper and pencil ?

    This from a doodler – I don’t know the answers but am interested in any explanations. Quite often I cannot explain something without drawing it, I need a paper and pencil to talk about some subjects – but not most.
    Enjoy finding out. and remember who you have asked. It is not the general public.
    Best wishes
    Anne


    • on January 4, 2013 at 12:42 PM ArtPlantae Today

      Excellent questions, Anne. Thank you. As I discover answers or related inquiries, I will let you all know.


  2. on January 5, 2013 at 11:09 AM Carol Creech

    Loved reading about this. Very interesting. I agree with Anne – this is a big subject. I am an avid doodler (esp. while in school) and usually can clearly remember what I was doing/hearing/watching while I was doodling or drawing. Lots of interesting questions and potential answers and definitely a worthwhile topic.
    Carol


  3. on January 11, 2013 at 7:30 AM Chris Brownell

    Do doodles work like landmarks in a lecture, for the doodler I mean? When I am working on a talk, I will take a walk and recite the ideas in my head. Then fix the ideas to visual cues along the walk, then when giving the talk I just replay the walk in my mind and access more of the content. Does doodling work like this for doodles? Does doodling work like those electronic pens that allow the user to randomly access part of a recording based on the geography of the page?



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