Why drawing what you’re learning works better than rereading it
Most students study the way they were taught to study. They reread. Textbook chapter once, highlighter out, reread, maybe copy key passages into a notebook. It feels productive because it is effortful and time-consuming. It is also, by the standards of learning science, one of the least efficient things you can do with an hour.
Compare that to a student who, after reading the same chapter, closes the book and tries to sketch what happened. Not a pretty illustration — a diagram, a messy flowchart, a labeled cartoon of a cell dividing. Arrows in the wrong place. A word crossed out. Five minutes of visible struggle. That student will, on average, remember more of the material a week later than the rereader, and will understand it more flexibly when the concept shows up in a new form.
Researchers have a name for this. They call it the generative drawing effect. In a series of experiments in the mid-2010s, Logan Fiorella and Richard Mayer at UC Santa Barbara gave college students short science texts about topics like how viruses replicate, then asked half of them to draw what they had just read. The other half either reread, wrote a summary, or studied a provided illustration. On both recall tests and transfer tests, where the concept had to be applied to a new scenario, the drawers came out ahead, often by a wide margin. Drawing beat rereading. Drawing beat writing a summary. Drawing even beat studying an already-correct diagram.
That last comparison is the interesting one. A good textbook diagram is, in theory, everything you need. It is drawn by an expert. The arrows point to the right things. But looking at a perfect diagram is a passive act. Making an imperfect one is an active one. You are forced to decide what to include, how to connect the parts, where to put the label. Each of those small decisions is a moment of retrieval, where your brain reaches for what it knows and tries to fit the pieces together. That reaching is the thing that builds the memory.
The mechanism has a textbook name: retrieval practice, sometimes called the testing effect. Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke’s widely cited 2006 study found that students who spent study time recalling material performed far better on a delayed test than students who spent the same amount of time rereading, even though the rereaders reported feeling more confident at the time. Drawing is retrieval practice with a specific shape. It forces you to pull concepts out of memory and organize them spatially. Two cognitive loads for the price of one.
There is a second mechanism operating underneath. Allan Paivio’s dual coding theory, first proposed in the early 1970s, argued that the brain encodes information in two parallel channels, a verbal one and a visual one, and that learning sticks best when both are engaged. Reading about the water cycle builds a verbal trace. Drawing the water cycle builds a verbal trace and a visual one, linked together. When you later try to remember what you learned, the visual trace offers a second path to the same information.
None of this is especially new. What is new is how consistently the finding shows up once researchers go looking for it. Meta-analyses of drawing-to-learn interventions across biology, chemistry, physics, and medicine have found that learners who draw while studying outperform those who use standard study methods, and the effect is largest on transfer tasks. Transfer tasks are the ones that ask whether you really understood, not just whether you memorized.
This work sits in direct lineage with the research project this site was originally built on. The NSF-funded Picturing to Learn initiative, which ran from 2007 to 2010, asked undergraduate science students to draw the concepts they were learning as if explaining them to a younger student. What came back was diagnostic. The drawings exposed misconceptions that multiple-choice tests had missed entirely. A student might get the right answer on a chemistry exam and still draw a bonding diagram that revealed they had no working model of what was actually happening underneath. The finding that runs through that archive, that making a picture makes thinking visible, is the same finding, from a slightly different angle, that Fiorella and Mayer arrived at through controlled experiments.
So why don’t more students draw?
One reason is that it feels harder than it is supposed to. Studying, in most students’ minds, should feel smooth. You read, you highlight, you underline, you nod. The material glides past. Drawing interrupts that glide. You stop. You realize you don’t remember whether the arrow goes from the mitochondrion to the nucleus or the other way around. You have to look something up. That interruption, that moment of not-knowing, is exactly the moment your brain forms a durable memory. But it feels like failing. Robert Bjork, the UCLA memory researcher, has spent decades writing about this under the banner of desirable difficulties: the techniques that feel least productive in the moment are often the ones that produce the most learning. Drawing is one of those techniques. Rereading is not.
A second reason is that most students believe they cannot draw. This is almost always a category error. The drawings that work for learning are not art. They are thinking on paper. They are allowed to be ugly, messy, and private. A biology student’s sketch of protein synthesis does not have to be readable by anyone else, including, later, the student themselves. The value is extracted during the making, not during the viewing.
A reasonable way to start, if you are a student or teaching one, is to replace a single rereading session per week with a drawing session. Put the book away. Take a blank piece of paper. Try to sketch, from memory, the structure of the argument or the mechanism of the process. Label what you can. Then open the book and see what you got wrong. The gap between what you drew and what the book says is the part you did not actually know yet.
That gap is the real lesson. The drawing was only the way of finding it.
Photo via Unsplash.