Experiments on the Efficacy of Drawing for Memorization among Adults and Children with Varying Written Word Memory Capacities: A Two-Way Crossover Design

Abstract

In recent years, the comparative effectiveness of drawing and writing for memory has been investigated, but the findings have mostly been analyzed for the entire sample of participants rather than subgroups. In quantitative two-way crossover experiments involving 134 children and 262 adults, drawing for memorization as compared to writing was investigated. The participants were divided into subgroups based on their ability to recall the greatest, moderate, or fewest words and drawings. The difference in the number of recalled words and drawings was then compared between subgroups with varying memory capacities for written words and drawings. Participants who had difficulty remembering written words recalled more drawings than written words relative to participants who remembered written words more easily—this applied to shorter- and longer-term memory. To determine the applicability of the findings to various contexts, the following conditions were varied in four separate experiments: participant age, duration of encoding and recall, number of words memorized, interval between encoding and recall, and the research setting. Drawing benefited memory more than writing in all tested scenarios for the subgroup that remembered the fewest number of words. The new finding of the study is that people who have difficulty remembering written words benefit the most from drawing for memorization compared to those who remember written words more easily and this applies to the various tested conditions.