Visual Literacy Skills of Students in College-Level Biology: Learning Outcomes following Digital or Hand-Drawing Activities
To test the claim that digital learning tools enhance the acquisition of visual literacy in this generation of biology students, a learning intervention was carried out with 33 students enrolled in an introductory college biology course. This study compared learning outcomes following two types of...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
2014-11-01
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| Series: | Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cjsotl_rcacea/vol5/iss1/6 |
| Summary: | To test the claim that digital learning tools enhance the acquisition of visual literacy in this generation of
biology students, a learning intervention was carried out with 33 students enrolled in an introductory college
biology course. This study compared learning outcomes following two types of learning tools: a traditional
drawing activity, or a learning activity on a computer. The sample was divided into two random groups. In the
first intervention students learned how to draw and label a cell. Group 1 learned the material by computer and
Group 2 learned the material by hand drawing. In the second intervention, students learned how to draw the
phases of mitosis, and the two groups were inverted. After each learning activity, students were given a quiz,
and were also asked to self-evaluate their performance in an attempt to measure their level of metacognition.
At the end of the study, participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire that was used to measure the level of
task engagement the students felt towards the two types of learning activities. The students who learned the
material by drawing had a significantly higher average grade on the associated quiz compared to that of those
who learned the material by computer. There were no other significant differences in learning outcomes
between the two groups. This study provides evidence that drawing by hand is beneficial for learning
biological images compared to learning the same material on a computer. |
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| ISSN: | 1918-2902 1918-2902 |