Sketchnoting¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 11 claims (8 for, 3 against) · 23 studies (14 causal, 8 quant-synthesis, 1 review), q2–q4 · 10 of 23 report an effect size · 4 claims rest on one study

Description¶

Sketchnoting is note-taking in which learners record ideas as a combination of small hand-drawn images, hand-lettered words, containers, arrows, and layout, rather than as running prose. The claim it rests on is not that learners have a visual style, and not that the notes are attractive: it is that deciding what to draw forces the learner to select the key idea, decide what it is like, and commit to a spatial relationship between ideas — three selections that verbatim transcription never requires. The artifact is a by-product; the selection is the learning.

Design Implications¶

Sketchnoting sits at the intersection of two well-supported effects. Generating a drawing of the content one is reading or hearing improves learning over reading alone Drawing improves STEM learning by a small-to-moderate amount over not drawing and over other active study strategies, in one meta-analysis [+M], and building one's own visual organizer outperforms studying an equivalent organizer supplied by the instructor Learner-constructed graphic organizers are not shown to outperform provided ones: the one direct test, with college readers, favoured provided organizers on transfer [+M]. Both are instances of generative processing: the learner has to select, organize, and integrate rather than receive Prompting learners to self-explain, one generative strategy, improves learning by a moderate average amount; other generative activities are not tested by the evidence recorded here [+M]. The dual verbal-and-visual encoding adds a second retrieval route to the same content Adding relevant pictures or graphics to text improves learning from it, with a small pooled effect on reading comprehension, though whether dual coding explains the benefit is disputed [+M].

The important caveat is that the evidence base is for drawing to learn, not for sketchnoting as a named practice. Studies typically use structured drawing prompts with defined target content and support materials; the popular version of sketchnoting — freeform, self-directed, aesthetically driven — is considerably less constrained than anything that has been tested, and the gap should be treated as an open question rather than an established result.

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Content with structure worth externalizing — causal chains, comparisons, processes, hierarchies. Lists of unrelated facts give the strategy nothing to work with
• Enough time to draw during or immediately after input; sketchnoting a fast lecture live is a different and harder task than sketchnoting a text
• Explicit permission that the drawings need not be good. Learners who believe they "can't draw" will otherwise revert to prose
• Prompts naming what to represent, at least at first — unsupported drawing frequently produces decorative rather than explanatory images Drawing improves STEM learning by a small-to-moderate amount over not drawing and over other active study strategies, in one meta-analysis [+M]
• A means of checking the notes against the content, since a well-drawn misconception is more memorable, not less (Feedback)

Constraints¶

• Drawing during live input competes for the same working memory the content needs; novices who draw while listening can lose both Cognitive Overload Degrades Learning [-S]
• Effort spent on visual polish is effort not spent on the content — decorative embellishment is extraneous processing wearing the costume of engagement Decorative Illustrations Do Not Improve Learning [-S]
• A learner-built visual whose structure does not fit the content's structure imposes load rather than reducing it Recall from bar graphs is more accurate when the recall format matches the studied graph format, a small effect that the content's thematic emphasis can override [-M]
• Slow relative to typing or writing; coverage per unit time falls, so it suits depth over breadth
• Learners with fine-motor or visual impairments may find the modality itself a barrier rather than a support [-M]
• The strategy's own literature is thin: the transfer from controlled drawing-prompt experiments to open-ended sketchnoting is assumed, not demonstrated [~W]

Implementation Variability¶

• Prompted drawing — the instructor names what to draw at defined points; the best-evidenced form (Draw to Explain)
• Post-hoc sketchnote summary — learners take conventional notes live, then convert to a one-page visual afterwards, which removes the divided-attention problem entirely
• Partial scaffold — a page pre-divided into regions or seeded with a few containers, so structure is given and content is generated
• Visual vocabulary pre-teaching — a short session establishing a shared set of simple glyphs (arrow, person, container, process) so learners are not inventing notation under time pressure
• Collaborative wall sketchnote — a group builds one large visual, making the selection decisions explicit and arguable

Target Learners¶

• Learners with enough domain knowledge to identify what matters; deciding what to draw presupposes knowing what is important Advance organizers aided learning in a 1980 meta-analysis, but activating prior topic knowledge did not improve primary pupils' text comprehension in one experiment [+M]
• Learners whose default note-taking is verbatim transcription, for whom any generative constraint is an improvement Laptop note-takers transcribed more verbatim and did worse on conceptual questions than longhand note-takers in one set of experiments, but a direct replication found no consistent difference in test performance [+M]
• Secondary and adult learners working with conceptually structured material
• Weaker fit for complete novices facing unfamiliar content at speed, where drawing and comprehending compete
• Weaker fit where the assessment demands precise terminology, since sketchnotes trade wording for gist

Target Learning Goals¶

• Comprehension and retention of structured explanatory content Generative Learning Improves Comprehension [+M]
• Understanding relationships — cause, sequence, containment, contrast — which spatial layout represents more directly than prose
• Durable recall through combined verbal and visual encoding In one 37-student classroom experiment, recall and retention differ across media combinations in the direction Dual Coding Theory predicts [+M]
• Summarization: reducing an extended input to its load-bearing ideas

Instructions¶

1. Establish a small visual vocabulary first. Spend ten minutes on five or six glyphs and two or three container shapes, so learners are not designing notation while trying to listen.
2. Say explicitly that legibility beats artistry. Show a deliberately crude example that works, so the standard is understood as functional.
3. Choose the timing deliberately. For novices or fast input, have learners listen first and sketch in a pause or afterwards; only fluent learners should sketch live (Cognitive Load Management).
4. Prompt the selection. At natural breaks, name the thing to represent — "draw what happens to the cell in step three" — rather than leaving learners to decide what deserves a picture (Draw to Explain).
5. Require relationships, not just icons. Ask for at least one arrow or containment per section, so structure gets encoded rather than a set of decorated keywords.
6. Have learners explain their sketchnote to a partner. The explanation is where a misleading layout becomes visible (Articulation, Self-Explanation).
7. Check against the source. Compare a few sketchnotes to the canonical account and correct shared errors publicly (Feedback).

Related Strategies¶

• Drawing to Learn — the underlying generative activity, without the note-taking framing
• Draw to Explain — prompted drawing tied to a specific explanatory target; the best-evidenced version of the mechanism
• Note-Taking Using Graphic Organizers — structure supplied rather than generated, trading generative benefit for reliability Graphic Organizers Support Novice Comprehension [+M]
• Mind Mapping — spatial, learner-generated, but node-and-branch rather than pictorial
• Concept Mapping — labelled-relation diagrams, more constrained and more assessable than sketchnotes
• Interactive Note-Taking — the broader family of note formats that require processing rather than transcription

Examples¶

Prompted drawing in science text comprehension: Schwamborn and colleagues had secondary students draw the process described in a chemistry text with a supplied background and element pieces; the drawing group outperformed the text-only group on comprehension and transfer.

Learner-generated graphic organizers: Stull and Mayer found across three experiments that students who built their own organizers while reading learned more than students given the same organizers ready-made — the construction, not the diagram, carried the effect.

Visual practice records in science education: Ainsworth, Prain, and Tytler argue that drawing is how scientists themselves reason, and that having students draw to explain — rather than to illustrate — aligns classroom practice with disciplinary practice.

Conference and meeting sketchnotes: The popular practice from which the classroom version derives — a single-page visual capture of a talk, produced live, prioritizing structure and gist over completeness.

Key Sources¶

• Ainsworth, S., Prain, V., & Tytler, R. (2011). Drawing to learn in science. Science, 333(6046), 1096–1097. doi:10.1126/science.1204153
• Schwamborn, A., Mayer, R. E., Thillmann, H., Leopold, C., & Leutner, D. (2010). Drawing as a generative activity and drawing as a prognostic activity. Journal of Educational Psychology, 102(4), 872–883. doi:10.1037/a0019640
• Stull, A. T., & Mayer, R. E. (2007). Learning by doing versus learning by viewing: Three experimental comparisons of learner-generated versus author-provided graphic organizers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(4), 808–820. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.99.4.808
• Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2015). Learning as a generative activity: Eight learning strategies that promote understanding. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9781107707085
• Van Meter, P., & Garner, J. (2005). The promise and challenge of advancing generative drawing as a model-building activity for learning. Educational Psychology Review, 17(4), 285–325.
• Wammes, J. D., Meade, M. E., & Fernandes, M. A. (2016). Learning concepts by drawing pictures. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(9), 1759–1771.