Does Drawing It Mean You Understand It? A Closer Look at Visual Note-Taking
There's not a more Anti-Boring study skill than doodling and drawing, don't you think?!
I dig a good visual note-taking system. Back when I taught middle school world history, I used an interactive notebook approach inspired by History Alive!. Sometimes I even asked students to draw their answers on a test instead of writing them.
At the time, I had a hunch that some students might be able to show their understanding better in a picture than a paragraph. And certainly, it was more fun for ME to grade their pictures!
But 20 years later, now that I'm obsessed with the science of learning, I find myself curious about a couple of questions:
What, if anything, can a drawing show us about what a student understands?
And can drawing actually help students develop their understanding in the first place?
Those questions came to mind recently when an academic coach in our summer certification cohort sent me a study about drawing and learning.
The timing couldn't have been better. I'm about to finally teach my Beyond Cornell masterclass on helping students take better notes, and visual note-taking is going to be a big part of it. I've been thinking a LOT about how to help students use drawings, diagrams, and other visual tools to make sense of what they're learning.
Meanwhile, this coach was deep in our Powerful Note-Taking module, and the research reminded her of something I ask everyone taking my course to practice: a process I call "honing your notes."
So, naturally, I wanted to know: Does this research have anything useful to teach us about helping students use visual notes to learn and study?
Turns out, yes. But first, we need to untangle a couple of ideas.
Yes, a Drawing CAN Show Us What a Student Understands
When I asked my world history students to draw an answer on a test, I was using drawing as a way for them to show me their thinking.
There’s research supporting the idea that drawings can be useful for this purpose. In a systematic review of 76 articles on drawing-based assessment in science education, researchers found that:
drawings can reveal aspects of students’ thinking that might be harder to capture through other methods, and
they can also help educators notice students’ ideas and conceptions—and decide what to explore next.
That makes sense to me. If I ask a student to represent a relationship visually, I might notice something about how they're connecting the ideas that I wouldn't see in a short written answer.
But there's a catch. A drawing doesn't necessarily tell us everything a student understands. A student might have a solid idea but struggle to represent it visually. Or they might produce a plausible-looking diagram without being able to explain the relationships it shows.
So a drawing can give us a window into a student's thinking, but it isn't the whole picture. (Sorry. Couldn't resist.)
And there's another job a drawing can do—one that's especially relevant when we're teaching students how to study.
A Drawing Can Help a Student Develop Understanding
Imagine a student reading about the water cycle. Instead of simply rereading the paragraph, they draw the ocean, clouds, mountains, and rivers, with arrows showing evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.
The goal isn't to make a beautiful picture. It's to make sense of how the water cycle works.
Researchers call this generative drawing: taking information, often from a science text, and turning it into a picture that represents objects, relationships, or processes.
And there's evidence that drawing can help. In two experiments with eighth graders reading a scientific text about influenza:
students who drew while reading performed better on comprehension and drawing-based learning measures than students who read without drawing; and
the students whose drawings more accurately represented the material also tended to perform better afterward.
But telling students to draw isn't the end of the story. Drawing can be cognitively demanding. Students have to decide what matters, figure out how to represent it, and organize the information into something that makes sense.
So teachers and researchers have tried different ways to help students get more learning out of the process of drawing.
And THAT is what the study my coach sent me was investigating.
Most students study wrong. Here's what the research actually says.
Our free "Science of Studying" guide is waiting for you in the library.
Check Out Our Free Library →The Surprise in the Research
In a 2025 meta-analysis, researchers brought together 14 studies involving 1,213 participants to investigate a slightly different question:
Once students are already drawing to learn, what kinds of additional instructional support actually help?
To clarify, the researchers weren't comparing drawing with not drawing. Instead, they were comparing students who received support for their drawing with students who were asked to draw without that extra support.
The researchers looked at three features of instructional support:
Some support made drawing easier—for example, by giving students part of a picture to work from.
Other support added learning activities, such as asking students to write an explanation before drawing.
And some helped students connect what they drew with the information they were learning, sometimes by comparing their drawings with a reference illustration. (These categories could overlap, by the way. A single activity might do more than one of these things.)
All three of these options sound pretty reasonable, don't they?
But guess what?! Only ONE of those features stood out as helping student learning the most. Can you guess which one?!
Drum roll please…
… helping students connect what they were drawing with the information they were learning!!
In other words, the support aimed at making connections between ideas—what the researchers call integration—was associated with a statistically significant improvement in comprehension compared with drawing without extra support.
The other two features didn't show a reliable additional comprehension benefit in this collection of studies.
Now, before you throw your colored pencils across the room, this does NOT mean making drawing easier is bad! Or that asking students to explain their thinking is pointless. Those supports might be important for an individual student, and an explanation can itself help students make connections.
The finding is more specific: in these studies, integration-focused support was the feature associated with better comprehension. The researchers also didn't have enough evidence to establish whether the same pattern held when students had to apply what they'd learned in new situations.
Which is a useful conclusion for those of us in the world of student success and academic skill-building
And leads to an important question that can help guide our coaching about note-taking specifically:
Are students using their drawings to connect ideas—or are they simply putting information on the page?
Since we're in the business of teaching students how to be teachers of themselves (that's how I define studying, after all), this is a really important question to be asking.
If helping students connect ideas matters so much, then how well are we teaching them to do that when they take notes?
What Does This Mean for Visual Note-Taking?
Think back to our water-cycle student. They've drawn the ocean, clouds, mountains, and rivers. They've labeled evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. Maybe they've even added some very impressive arrows.
Great! They've got something to work with.
But what do those arrows actually mean to them? Can they explain why water moves from one part of the cycle to another? If they notice something in the text that doesn't match their drawing, will they recognize the discrepancy? And what might happen to their understanding if they investigate it?
Those are the kinds of questions that move us from putting information on a page toward making sense of it.
There's another study that helps illuminate this distinction. In research with fifth graders , students who were taught to make organizational sketches—drawings that show relationships among ideas—performed better on comprehension tests than students who were taught to sketch details or students who didn't draw. They were also better at judging how well they'd understood what they read.
I love that distinction. The point wasn't to make the drawing more elaborate. It was to help students pay attention to how the ideas fit together.
And this reminds me of another distinction I teach in the Study Cycle: encoding versus retrieval.
When students draw while they're reading, they're working to encode the information—to make sense of it and build something they can remember. And when they're drawing relationships rather than simply copying details, they may be doing some particularly useful thinking.
But here's the thing: Working with information while it's in front of you isn't the same as finding out what you can remember and explain later.
That's where retrieval comes in. What happens if our water-cycle student closes the book and tries to explain the process from memory? Can they recreate the diagram? Can they explain why the arrows point where they do?
Now they're getting information about what they've actually learned—and what still needs work.
And suddenly I'm thinking about those world history tests again. When I asked students to draw their answers, I wasn't just asking them to make a picture. I was asking them to show me what they could bring back and make sense of without the lesson sitting in front of them.
Which brings me to the question I'm carrying into Beyond Cornell: How do we teach students to create visual notes that help them make connections and use those notes to study?
Of course, we need to teach students how to identify important information and represent it in their notes. That's meaningful work! But we also need to think about what happens once the information is on the page. How do students use what they've created to deepen their understanding? And how do they check what they can retrieve without looking?
I want to be careful about what we can conclude from the research. The 2025 meta-analysis investigated generative drawing, not every form of visual note-taking. It doesn't establish that one particular approach works for every chart, diagram, or sketchnote. And it didn't test the full encoding-and-retrieval process I've just described.
But it gives us a compelling question to ask about our teaching: Are we helping students make notes, or are we also helping them learn from the notes they make?
What About Students Who Need More Support?
Helping students make connections is one thing. Helping them manage that process independently is another.
Think about what it takes to compare a diagram with a text, notice a missing connection, and decide what to change. A student has to manage their attention, hold information in mind, monitor their understanding, and act on what they notice.
Whew. That's a substantial executive function task.
And now we're also asking students to put the notes away, retrieve what they remember, and figure out what they need to work on next.
For some neurodivergent learners, including students with ADHD or other executive function differences, the challenge may not be understanding why these activities matter. It may be managing all those steps without support.
We might need to:
model what it looks like to investigate one relationship.
invite a student to talk through an idea rather than write an explanation.
practice recreating just one part of a diagram from memory before asking them to tackle the whole thing.
discover that drawing isn't the most useful way for this particular student to work with the material.
The 2025 meta-analysis didn't address adaptations for neurodivergent students. But this is the distinction we work with all the time in the Anti-Boring Learning Lab: knowing a strategy is good. Knowing how to teach it, practice it, scaffold it, and adapt it to the student in front of us is another thing entirely.
Drawing Is Great. Now Let's Teach Students What to Do With It.
Am I still a fan of drawing? Oh, absolutely.
I'm still glad I asked my world history students to show me their thinking in different ways. And I'm still excited to teach visual note-taking in Beyond Cornell.
What I'm taking from this research isn't a reason to draw less. It's a reason to think more carefully about what we're asking students to do with their drawings.
Are we helping them identify the important ideas? See how those ideas fit together? Notice when something doesn't quite make sense? And then find out what they can explain and remember without looking?
That's part of why I'm so excited to teach honing your notes in Beyond Cornell: Non-Annoying Ways to Teach Students to Take Better Notes. We won't just explore ways to make visual notes. We'll practice how to teach students to work with the notes they've made, so those notes become tools for learning rather than finished products to admire.
Because the goal isn't to make the prettiest page in the notebook.
It's to understand something you didn't understand before—and be able to bring that understanding back when you need it.
Reading this before October 27, 2026? Come join us live! And if you're finding this article afterward, you can join the Anti-Boring Learning Lab and watch the recording.
Your Turn
Have you ever asked a student to draw what they know? What did their drawing reveal—and what did you have to ask next to find out whether they really understood it?
I'd love to hear how you're using drawing or visual note-taking with your students. Tell me in the comments!
In Sum: Let’s Q&A
Phew! You read a whole blog post, and now MORE questions?! Don't worry—we're not sneaking in new content. These Q&As just help skimmers find what they need and AI understand our work. They're for the humans and the robots.
Does drawing actually help students learn?
Yes! But what students are doing with their brains while they draw matters. Turning information into a picture can help them make sense of it, especially when they're figuring out how ideas connect. That's why, in the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, we're interested in more than giving students a fun way to take notes. We want to help them use those notes to learn.
If a student can draw a concept, does that mean they understand it?
Maybe! A drawing can give us a fascinating peek into a student's thinking, but it doesn't tell us everything. Can they explain the relationships they've drawn? What happens when they put the source material away and try to recreate or explain the idea from memory? Those are the kinds of questions I encourage coaches to get curious about in the Anti-Boring Learning Lab.
What's the difference between drawing to learn and visual note-taking?
Drawing to learn usually means turning information into a picture to help yourself understand it. Visual note-taking is a bigger category: diagrams, charts, symbols, words, and all sorts of combinations. In the Anti-Boring Toolkit, we teach students to work with visual notes in different ways. The research in this article is specifically about drawing to learn, so we shouldn't assume every finding applies to every kind of visual note.
How can I help a student learn more from a diagram?
Get curious about the connections! Ask what an arrow means, why two ideas belong together, or whether the diagram matches what the student just read. And if the student doesn't know how to check their own work yet, show them what that looks like. That's a big part of our work in the Anti-Boring Learning Lab: we don't just hand students a strategy and hope they figure out how to use it.
Can drawing be used for retrieval practice?
Absolutely. Drawing while looking at a chapter and drawing from memory are two different learning activities. In the Study Cycle I teach, the first can support encoding; the second can be a form of retrieval. Have the student put the notes away, recreate or explain the diagram, and then check what they remembered. The point isn't to produce a perfect drawing. It's to discover what they know and what needs another look.
Is drawing a good note-taking strategy for students with ADHD?
It might be! But I wouldn't prescribe drawing for every student with ADHD—or assume that because a strategy is visual, it's automatically easier. Deciding what to draw, checking whether it makes sense, and figuring out what to change can take a LOT of executive function. In the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, we help coaches think about how to model and scaffold those steps, or choose a different approach when drawing isn't the right fit for a particular student.
Works Cited
Chang, H.-Y., Lin, T.-J., Lee, M.-H., Lee, S. W.-Y., Lin, T.-C., Tan, A.-L., & Tsai, C.-C. (2020). A systematic review of trends and findings in research employing drawing assessment in science education. Studies in Science Education, 56(1), 77–110.
Leutner, D., & Biele, J. (2025). Without integration, everything is nothing: A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of instructional support for drawing-to-learn. Educational Psychology Review, 37, Article 93.
Schmeck, A., Mayer, R. E., Opfermann, M., Pfeiffer, V., & Leutner, D. (2014). Drawing pictures during learning from scientific text: Testing the generative drawing effect and the prognostic drawing effect. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 39(4), 275–286.
Thiede, K. W., Wright, K. L., Hagenah, S., Wenner, J. A., Abbott, J., & Arechiga, A. (2022). Drawing to improve metacomprehension accuracy. Learning and Instruction, 77, Article 101541.