Drawing as a Viable Note-taking Strategy?

Productivity
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Attended a note-taking workshop and got directed toward interesting research.

“The Surprisingly Powerful Influence of Drawing on Memory”

It’s a 5 page read that summarizes the author’s research so it’s worth taking a look. But basically they administered word recognition tests and compared a variety of encoding strategies. Drawing out performed all of them, including mentally visualizing the words shown (subjects didn’t use loci for a spatial component, though.) After multiple comparisons they conclude that drawing works so well because it engages elaborative processing (understanding the meaning enough to turn it into an image), pictorial processing (seeing your drawing) and motor processing (the actual act of drawing.) Meanwhile the other strategies only engaged one or two of these.

The one exception to drawing always out-performing was that when it came to learning definitions, drawing performed just as well as writing the definition in your own words, while copying the definition verbatim performed worse than both.

Think I’ll incorporate some drawing into my note-taking more. The fun thing about mnemonic techniques is getting creative with your mental visualizations, so this could be another way to have that kind of fun while doing effective learning.

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Thanks for sharing. Can you say more about the workshop? There are a few books and workshops around Sketchnotes that I have considered in the past.

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I usually note and lern from pictures, i admit that this is more effective method (for me). I have even found way to draw some definitions. Firstly I try to imagine where does definition come from than I draw it down. It worked for physics chemistry. It is harder for math, but can be done.

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It was a college success workshop and went over a broad amount of advice. This was gone over briefly and I decided to read more on my own. Most of it would be familiar to people, I’m sure, like writing notes in your own words and having your own system of conventions.

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